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Co-Evolving Acting and Forecasting for Language Agents

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (ulab-uiuc) posted a paper on arXiv on 14 Oct 2026 introducing CoPE, a language-agent training method that adds multi-step action targets to agentic reinforcement learning so acting and forecasting co-evolve in a single policy backbone. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, τ²-bench, and AppWorld), CoPE outperformed GRPO and predictive-auxiliary-target RL baselines and delivered up to 1.9× and 2.0× higher sample efficiency than ECHO and GRPO, respectively, on ScienceWorld, with no additional models, separate pretraining, or inference overhead. The codebase is available at github.com/ulab-uiuc/CoPE.

read2 min views18 publishedOct 15, 2026
Co-Evolving Acting and Forecasting for Language Agents
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  [Submitted on 14 Oct 2026]


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Abstract:Training language agents is bottlenecked by the high cost of long-horizon rollouts, yet standard agentic reinforcement learning (RL) learns only from a terminal scalar reward, leaving the supervision in intermediate steps largely unused. Prior work exploits this supervision through value targets that estimate per-step success probabilities or observation targets that fit environment response. Both are hard to construct well: (1) value targets come from the same single scalar signal for each step in the trajectory, and (2) observation targets, such as web pages and terminal logs, are long and noisy and reach only one step ahead. We propose \name, which adds a third kind of multi-step action targets. On successful on-policy trajectories, \name trains the policy backbone to generate the action sequences that follows each history. Each action is also supervised when forecast from the preceding histories, forming a temporal ensemble that the shared backbone absorbs during training, and this enables acting and forecasting to co-evolve. The policy still acts one step at a time at inference, with no overhead. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, $\tau^2$-bench, and AppWorld), \name (1) achieves stronger aggregate performance than GRPO and RL baselines with predictive auxiliary targets across simulated environments, while improving overall performance on both realistic applications; (2) delivers up to $1.9\times$ and $2.0\times$ higher sample efficiency than ECHO and GRPO, respectively, on ScienceWorld; and (3) achieves these gains with a single policy backbone, without additional models, separate pretraining, or inference overhead. The codebase is available at this https URL.

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