arxivcs.LG2026-07-15
TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agents
Leitian Tao, Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Tao Ge, Hao Cheng, Mike Hang Wang, et al.
Multi-turn agents solve complex tasks through extended sequences of tool interactions before producing a final answer, making credit assignment a fundamental challenge during post-training. Outcome rewards provide reliable supervision for short-horizon reasoning, but become spars…