# Scaling Autonomous Agents via Automatic Reward Modeling And Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 56 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Reinforcement learning for LLM agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/reinforcement-learning-for-llm-agents/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Process reward models for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/process-reward-models-for-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01206/) (2022)
- [Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06070/) (2023)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01734/) (2019)
- [Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01815/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models: What, How, Where, and How Well?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24235/) (2025)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19683/) (2025)
- [AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18407/) (2025)
- [Optimas: Optimizing Compound AI Systems with Globally Aligned Local Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03041/) (2025)
- [Grounding Multimodal LLMs to Embodied Agents that Ask for Help with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00907/) (2025)
- [KnowRL: Exploring Knowledgeable Reinforcement Learning for Factuality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19807/) (2025)
- [SEEA-R1: Tree-Structured Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Self-Evolving Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21669/) (2025)
- [Environment Scaling for Interactive Agentic Experience Collection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09586/) (2025)
- [Explore with Long-term Memory: A Benchmark and Multimodal LLM-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Embodied Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10744/) (2026)
- [RoboAgent: Chaining Basic Capabilities for Embodied Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07774/) (2026)
- [Scaling Test-Time Inference with Policy-Optimized, Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation via KV Caching and Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01281/) (2025)
- [Self-evolving LLM agents with in-distribution Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07367/) (2026)
- [TextResNet: Decoupling and Routing Optimization Signals in Compound AI Systems via Deep Residual Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08306/) (2026)
- [Galaxy: A Cognition-Centered Framework for Proactive, Privacy-Preserving, and Self-Evolving LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03991/) (2025)
- [AutoContext: Instance-Level Context Learning for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02369/) (2025)
- [Efficient Reasoning on the Edge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16867/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Gene Ontology Knowledge Discovery with Hierarchical Feature Selection and Virtual Study Group of AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20132/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of text-generation tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with problems requiring multi-step decision-making and environmental feedback, such as online shopping, scientific reasoning, and mathematical problem-solving. Unlike pure text data, collecting large-scale decision-making data is challenging. Moreover, many powerful LLMs are only accessible through APIs, which hinders their fine-tuning for agent tasks due to cost and complexity. To address LLM agents' limitations, we propose a framework that can automatically learn a reward model from the environment without human annotations. This model can be used to evaluate the action trajectories of LLM agents and provide heuristics for task planning. Specifically, our approach involves employing one LLM-based agent to navigate an environment randomly, generating diverse action trajectories. Subsequently, a separate LLM is leveraged to assign a task intent and synthesize a negative response alongside the correct response for each trajectory. These triplets (task intent, positive response, and negative response) are then utilized as training data to optimize a reward model capable of scoring action trajectories. The effectiveness and generalizability of our framework are demonstrated through evaluations conducted on different agent benchmarks. In conclusion, our proposed framework represents a significant advancement in enhancing LLM agents' decision-making capabilities. By automating the learning of reward models, we overcome the challenges of data scarcity and API limitations, potentially revolutionizing the application of LLMs in complex and interactive environments. This research paves the way for more sophisticated AI agents capable of tackling a wide range of real-world problems requiring multi-step decision-making.