Chao Song
Author directory2026
Demystifying Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tool-Using Agents: A Comprehensive Recipe
Xixi Wu | Qianguo Sun | Ruiyang Zhang | Chao Song | Junlong Wu | Yiyan Qi | Hong Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xixi Wu | Qianguo Sun | Ruiyang Zhang | Chao Song | Junlong Wu | Yiyan Qi | Hong Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents capable of long-horizon planning, yet a practical recipe for scaling RL in complex, multi-turn environments remains elusive. This paper presents a systematic empirical study using TravelPlanner, a challenging testbed requiring tool orchestration to satisfy multifaceted constraints. We decompose the agentic RL design space along 5 axes: reward shaping, model scaling, data composition, algorithm selection, and environmental stability. Our controlled experiments yield 7 key takeaways, e.g., (1) reward and algorithm choices are scale-dependent as smaller models benefit from staged rewards and enhanced exploration, whereas larger models converge efficiently with simpler dense rewards, (2) ~1K training samples with a balanced difficulty mixture mark an empirical sweet spot for balancing in-domain and out-of-domain performance under our primary setting, and (3) environmental stability is critical to prevent policy degradation. Based on our distilled recipe, our RL-trained models achieve state-of-the-art performance on TravelPlanner, outperforming leading LLMs.