about
Can RL Improve Generalization of LLM Agents? An Empirical Study (arxiv.org)
3 points by tsurg_dot_com 204 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: They tested agents trained with reward-based fine-tuning on harder tasks in the same world, then on brand-new worlds with different knowledge and controls. Training held up within one world but broke in new ones, while training across several worlds kept skills without much forgetting.

Abstract

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown promise for training LLM agents to perform multi-turn decision-making based on environment feedback. However, most existing evaluations remain largely in-domain: training and testing are conducted in the same environment or even on the same tasks. In real-world deployment, agents may operate in unseen environments with different background knowledge, observation spaces, and action interfaces. To characterize the generalization profile of RFT under such shifts, we conduct a systematic study along three axes: (1) within-environment generalization across task difficulty, (2) cross-environment transfer to unseen environments, and (3) sequential multi-environment training to quantify transfer and forgetting. Our results show that RFT generalizes well across task difficulty within an environment, but exhibits weaker transfer to unseen environments, which correlates with shifts in both semantic priors and observation/action interfaces. In contrast, sequential training yields promising downstream gains with minimal upstream forgetting, and mixture training across environments improves the overall balance. We further provide detailed analyses and deeper insights, and hope our work helps the community develop and deploy generalizable LLM agents.

Zhiheng Xi, Xin Guo, Jiaqi Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Yutao Fan, Zhihao Zhang, Shichun Liu, Mingxu Chai, Xiaowei Shi, Yitao Zhai, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, et al.
arXiv:2603.12011 · cs.AI · submitted Mar 12, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Preprint, under review

add comment on HN

This recent paper from Fudan University is a highly relevant read given the current industry focus on RL for LLMs (like GRPO). The authors investigate a very practical question: do the improvements brought by reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) actually generalize beyond their training distribution when applied to multi-turn agents?