Divergent Paths: Learning an Outcome-Predictive Representation of LLM Agent Trajectories
cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-14
Updated: 2026-10-14
Comments: 9 pages, 8 pages appendix
Code: https://github.com/alexgill321/precog-rm
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: In this work, we reframe agentic trajectories as paths through a shared embedding space of actions and environmental observations.
Abstract
In this work, we reframe agentic trajectories as paths through a shared embedding space of actions and environmental observations. We show that successful and failed rollouts of the same task separate in this space, with simple per-task discriminators predicting held-out rollout outcomes at up to 0.95 AUROC across three agent benchmarks and three policy models. To exploit this signal across tasks, we introduce Precog-RM, a transformer-based model that meta-learns a representation in which outcome prediction can be performed in a few-shot setting. We show that Precog-RM generalizes to unseen tasks and models, and gives confident predictions of trajectory success long before termination. Deployed as an early stopping controller for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on Tau2-Bench, Precog-RM cuts training FLOPs by up to 47.3% while maintaining performance comparable to baseline GRPO.
Sources
- AgentRx: Diagnosing AI Agent Failures from Execution Trajectories
- $\tau^2$-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment
- Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
- Hierarchy-of-Groups Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks
- VinePPO: Refining Credit Assignment in RL Training of LLMs
- Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective
- UltraHorizon: Benchmarking Agent Capabilities in Ultra Long-Horizon Scenarios
- Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces
- AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments
- High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation
- DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
- CARL: Criticality-Aware Agentic Reinforcement Learning
- Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning
- TRACER: Trajectory Risk Aggregation for Critical Episodes in Agentic Reasoning
- Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback
- APEX-Agents
- Information Gain-based Policy Optimization: A Simple and Effective Approach for Multi-Turn Search Agents
- TopoCurate:Modeling Interaction Topology for Tool-Use Agent Training
- Free Process Rewards without Process Labels
- Selective Rollout: Mid-Trajectory Termination for Multi-Sample Agent RL
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