用高质量奖励提升终端智能体的通用行为,让小模型也能高效学习。
Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents

- 通过筛选环境与过程正则化,提升强化学习奖励质量。
- 仅用30%环境,性能比基线提升106%和30%。
- 适用于不同规模模型,对开源大模型效果显著。
终端智能体是大语言模型的重要应用,有望深度融入用户日常流程。强化学习(RL)是提升其能力的关键技术,但可扩展训练环境仍是核心挑战。由于真实用户交互数据稀缺,合成环境成为替代方案,却常因领域差异和保真度不足导致泛化能力差。现有研究多关注合成环境的数量与多样性,而忽视奖励信号质量及泛化机制。本文提出「智能体组合泛化」假说:强化学习并非从零学习新技能,而是塑造预训练和监督微调中已习得低层技能的高层决策行为。实证结果支持该假说,表明验证器质量比单纯增加环境数量或多样性更为关键。据此提出River训练方案:通过过滤低质环境,并在结果奖励中加入过程级行为正则化以提升奖励质量。使用该方案,我们的8B开源模型在四个终端智能体基准上表现最佳。River还具备跨模型家族、规模、智能体框架与强化学习目标的泛化能力。在终端基准轻量版和v2.1上,仅需少于30%的TMax训练环境,即可分别实现平均106%和30%的强化学习增益。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Terminal agents are a compelling application of large language models (LLMs), with the potential to integrate deeply into users' daily workflows. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key technique for improving their capabilities, making scalable training environments a central challenge. Since public real-user interaction data are scarce, synthetic environments provide a practical alternative, but often suffer from domain gaps and limited fidelity, leading to poor generalization. Existing work mainly scales the quantity and diversity of synthetic environments, while reward-signal quality and the mechanisms governing generalization remain under-explored. We study how RL improves terminal agents and propose the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis: rather than teaching new domain-specific skills from scratch, RL primarily shapes high-level decision-making behaviors that compose and route low-level skills acquired during pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This account is consistent with our empirical results and suggests that verifier quality, which determines which behaviors are reinforced, is more important than simply increasing environment quantity or diversity. Motivated by this insight, we propose River, a simple training recipe that improves reward quality by filtering low-quality environments and augmenting outcome rewards with process-level behavior regularization. Using this recipe, our RL-trained agent achieves the best performance among evaluated open-source RL-trained 8B models across four terminal-agent benchmarks. River also generalizes across model families, scales, agent harnesses, and RL objectives. Using fewer than 30% of the TMax training environments, River improves RL gains by 106% and 30% on average for models ranging from 2B to 27B on Terminal-Bench-Lite and Terminal-Bench-v2.1, respectively.
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