Dependency-Aware Reward Shaping for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.01207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When training large language models with reinforcement learning, terminal rewards provide little guidance about which steps matter. Common methods for assigning step credit overlook that work built on uncorrected mistakes is wasted while independent work remains valid. With only a final success/failure reward, every step in a failed episode has zero total future reward, even when it made progress. We propose Dependency-Aware Reward Shaping (DARS),