mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Behavior Knowledge Merge in Reinforced Agentic Models

arXiv 2601.13572 ↗First posted 20 Jan 2026cs.LGcited by 11

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning (RL) is central to post-training, particularly for agentic models that require specialized reasoning behaviors. In this setting, model merging offers a practical mechanism for integrating multiple RL-trained agents from different tasks into a single generalist model. However, existing merging methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and they are suboptimal to preserve task-specific capabilities on RL-trained agentic models. The root is a task-vector mismatch between RL and SFT: on-policy RL induces task vectors that are highly sparse and heterogeneous, whereas SFT-style merging implicitly assumes dense and globally comparable task vectors. When standard global averaging is applied under this mismatch, RL's non-overlapping task vectors that encode critical task-specific behaviors are reduced and parameter updates are diluted. To address this issue, we propose Reinforced Agent Merging (RAM), a distribution-aware merging framework explicitly designed for RL-trained agentic models. RAM disentangles shared and task-specific unique parameter updates, averaging shared components while selectively preserving and rescaling unique ones to counteract parameter update dilution. Experiments across multiple agent domains and model architectures demonstrate that RAM not only surpasses merging baselines, but also unlocks synergistic potential among agents to achieve performance superior to that of specialized agents in their domains.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 38 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

Builds on

38 of 53 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Mitigating Forgetting Between Supervised and Reinforcement Learning Yields Stronger Reasoners6 Oct
  2. 2025AIRL-S: Unifying Reinforcement Learning and Search-Based Test-Time Scaling via Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning19 Aug
  3. 2025Learning to Reason without External Rewards26 May
  4. 2025SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution25 Feb
  5. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms20 Jul

Other references · 33

  1. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,305
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,944
  4. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,371
  5. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
  6. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
  7. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
  8. 2022Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCodecited by 1,462
  9. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
  10. 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,346
  11. 2020Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Stepscited by 1,282
  12. 2023Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunchcited by 694
21 more
  1. 2025SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-trainingcited by 672
  2. 2021Merging Models with Fisher-Weighted Averagingcited by 621
  3. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 467
  4. 2025ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needscited by 362
  5. 2024LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Limited LLM Benchmarkcited by 262
  6. 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 215
  7. 2025ZeroSearch: Incentivize the Search Capability of LLMs without Searchingcited by 208
  8. 2025Mobile-Agent-v3: Fundamental Agents for GUI Automationcited by 190
  9. 2024Towards Safer Large Language Models through Machine Unlearningcited by 139
  10. 2025Whoever Started the Interference Should End It: Guiding Data-Free Model Merging via Task Vectorscited by 62
  11. 2023CrossGET: Cross-Guided Ensemble of Tokens for Accelerating Vision-Language Transformerscited by 44
  12. 2025LongMamba: Enhancing Mamba's Long Context Capabilities via Training-Free Receptive Field Enlargementcited by 42
  13. 2025Two Heads are Better Than One: Test-time Scaling of Multi-agent Collaborative Reasoningcited by 29
  14. 2025SwiReasoning: Switch-Thinking in Latent and Explicit for Pareto-Superior Reasoning LLMscited by 22
  15. 2025Superficial Self-Improved Reasoners Benefit from Model Mergingcited by 16
  16. 2024AmoebaLLM: Constructing Any-Shape Large Language Models for Efficient and Instant Deploymentcited by 12
  17. 2025Pretrained Image-Text Models are Secretly Video Captionerscited by 11
  18. 2025What Makes a Good Curriculum? Disentangling the Effects of Data Ordering on LLM Mathematical Reasoningcited by 11
  19. 2025Revisiting Model Interpolation for Efficient Reasoningcited by 10
  20. 2026Addressing Overthinking in Large Vision-Language Models via Gated Perception-Reasoning Optimizationcited by 6
  21. 2025What Makes LLMs Effective Sequential Recommenders? A Study on Preference Intensity and Temporal Contextcited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Enough is as good as a feast: A Comprehensive Analysis of How Reinforcement Learning Mitigates Task Conflicts in LLMs
  2. 2026SFT Conflicts, RL Coexists: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Multi-Task Learning for LLMs
  3. 2026Consolidating RLVR Capabilities Across Domains: A Deep Dive into Fusion Paradigms
  4. 2026Can RL Improve Generalization of LLM Agents? An Empirical Study
  5. 2025Echo Chamber: RL Post-training Amplifies Behaviors Learned in Pretraining
  6. 2026Reasoning and Tool-use Compete in Agentic RL:From Quantifying Interference to Disentangled Tuning
  7. 2026Selective Transfer of RL Updates for Visual Reasoning
  8. 2026Spectral Rewiring for Exploration, Purification, and Model Merging