Critics that predict task success, not just returns, improve long-horizon agent credit assignment

SCALE adds an explicit success probability head to actor-critic RL and uses reliability-weighted changes in that probability to credit intermediate actions, raising success rates on five agent benchmarks.

Chinese Tech
Jiaxi Liu · Shixiong Kai · Zhentao Tang · Yang Li · Yuqi Cui · Mingxuan Yuan · +1 more

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Research Digest··3 min read
Liu et al.

The authors start from an observation: a critic trained to predict expected return can have good aggregate accuracy while failing to distinguish which of two intermediate actions makes eventual success more likely, especially for steps far from the end of a trajectory.

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