提出无需训练的评估框架,直接对比长程智能体中间动作的监督信号质量。
QVal: Cheaply Evaluating Dense Supervision Signals for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

- 构建无训练测试平台,用参考策略的Q值衡量中间动作评分是否合理
- 21种方法在4个环境上测试,发现提示词基线优于多数新方法
- 结果跨模型规模、环境和观测模态稳定,适合快速迭代监督设计
大语言模型智能体在长时序任务中需处理数百甚至上千步动作。仅靠最终结果奖励过于稀疏,难以指导中间决策。现有密集监督方法通过打分中间步骤来改进,如置信度、自蒸馏或嵌入相似性。但当前评估依赖集成后的下游性能,成本高且混淆了监督质量与训练工程因素,导致不同方法无法公平比较。本文提出QVal,一个无需训练的测试平台,直接评估监督信号的质量:给定状态-动作对,衡量其得分是否与强参考策略的Q值排序一致。我们实现QVal-v1.0,对21种密集监督方法在四个多样化环境中进行评测,涵盖七类方法,使用六种开源模型骨干完成超过1200次实验。结果表明,简单提示基线始终优于文献中的新方法,且性能明显按方法族聚集。该现象在不同模型规模、环境和观察模态下均成立。QVal可轻松扩展至新环境与方法,支持研究者在训练前快速验证监督设计。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM agents increasingly act over long horizons, where a single trajectory can contain hundreds or thousands of actions. In these settings, outcome-only rewards provide too sparse guidance, failing to inform the model about the goodness of intermediate actions. Dense supervision methods aim to solve this problem by scoring intermediate steps, from intrinsic confidence to self-distillation and embedding similarities. However, it is common practice to evaluate them by measuring the downstream performance of a training pipeline that integrates them. This is expensive, conflates supervision quality with training engineering confounders, and renders different methodological families requiring distinct training setups incomparable. As a result, dense supervision methods are rarely benchmarked on common ground. We introduce QVal, a training-free testbed for directly evaluating dense supervision signals. Given a state-action pair, QVal measures how well a method's score is Q-aligned: whether it orders actions according to the Q-values of a strong reference-policy. This lets us compare signals before any training run and separate signal quality from other engineering choices. We instantiate QVal as QVal-v1.0, benchmarking 21 dense supervision methods across four diverse environments and seven methodological families, with over 1.2K evaluation experiments across six open-weight model backbones. We find that simple prompting baselines consistently outperform recent dense supervision methods from the literature, and that performance clusters strongly by family. These findings hold across model sizes, environments, and observation modalities. QVal is designed to be easily extensible to new environments and methods, enabling researchers to iterate on dense supervision methods before any training run.
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