Paper

SEED: Self-Evolving On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Self-distillation from hindsight skills: the policy summarizes its own completed rollouts, then uses skill-conditioned rescoring to add dense token-level RL supervision.

arXiv ↗Jul 16, 2026Code ↗

  • nlp
  • llm
  • reinforcement learning
  • agents
  • distillation
Two-stage pipeline diagram showing SEED method: hindsight SFT and on-policy distillation
Two-stage pipeline diagram showing SEED method: hindsight SFT and on-policy distillation

What it is

Turns completed on-policy agent trajectories into hindsight skills, then distills their effect as dense token-level supervision during RL for long-horizon LLM agents. Instead of relying only on sparse outcome rewards or static skill prompts, it has the current policy analyze its own finished trajectories into hindsight skills and distills the skill-conditioned probability shift back into the base policy on-policy.

Key results

  • ALFWorld avg 91.8 vs 84.4 best baseline
  • Search-based QA avg 45.7 vs 44.6 best baseline
  • WebShop success 78.9 vs 68.0 best baseline

Shows that self-generated, on-policy hindsight can bridge sparse trajectory rewards and token-level learning without inference-time skill prompts.

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