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The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs (arxiv.org)
4 points by sonabinu on Sep 4, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: This survey sorts 500-plus studies of training language models as agents that act over many steps in messy, partly hidden worlds, unlike today's one-shot text training. It groups them by skills like planning, tool use, and memory, and lists free environments and tests.

Abstract · The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey

The emergence of agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) marks a paradigm shift from conventional reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLM RL), reframing LLMs from passive sequence generators into autonomous, decision-making agents embedded in complex, dynamic worlds. This survey formalizes this conceptual shift by contrasting the degenerate single-step Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) of LLM-RL with the temporally extended, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that define Agentic RL. Building on this foundation, we propose a comprehensive twofold taxonomy: one organized around core agentic capabilities, including planning, tool use, memory, reasoning, self-improvement, and perception, and the other around their applications across diverse task domains. Central to our thesis is that reinforcement learning serves as the critical mechanism for transforming these capabilities from static, heuristic modules into adaptive, robust agentic behavior. To support and accelerate future research, we consolidate the landscape of open-source environments, benchmarks, and frameworks into a practical compendium. By synthesizing over five hundred recent works, this survey charts the contours of this rapidly evolving field and highlights the opportunities and challenges that will shape the development of scalable, general-purpose AI agents.

Guibin Zhang, Hejia Geng, Xiaohang Yu, Zhenfei Yin, Zaibin Zhang, Zelin Tan, Heng Zhou, Zhongzhi Li, Xiangyuan Xue, Yijiang Li, Yifan Zhou, Yang Chen, et al.
arXiv:2509.02547 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Sep 2, 2025 · updated Apr 17, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Published on Transactions on Machine Learning Research: https://openreview.net/forum?id=RY19y2RI1O

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