mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Act More, Decide Less: Skill-Guided Adaptive Action Chunking for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

arXiv 2609.02042 ↗First posted 2 Sep 2026cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon interactive tasks typically follow a ReAct-style protocol, issuing one primitive action per LLM round. While this enables frequent replanning, it is inefficient for long-horizon tasks where many rounds are spent on routine action sequences. A natural alternative is to let the agent emit variable-length action chunks. However, naively training such policies with standard reinforcement learning fails: the agent either collapses to single-action behavior or over-commits to excessively long sequences. Both failures share a common root cause: the inability to learn chunk boundaries. We propose SPACE, which addresses this challenge by distilling chunk-boundary supervision from trajectory-induced programmatic skills. We induce two-level programmatic skills from successful trajectories, where subskill boundaries serve as direct chunk-boundary supervision. This temporal structure is then distilled into a primitive-chunk policy via hybrid on-/off-policy optimization with chunk-aware credit assignment. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that SPACE improves success rates by 7.0%-31.3% over the strongest baseline in each setting while reducing average LLM decision rounds by up to 78.9%.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 28 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.

Builds on

28 of 36 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Policy and World Modeling Co-Training for Language Agents1 Jun
  2. 2025Meta-RL Induces Exploration in Language Agents18 Dec
  3. 2025SPA-RL: Reinforcing LLM Agents via Stepwise Progress Attribution27 May
  4. 2025Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training16 May
  5. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agents3 Feb
  6. 2024ArCHer: Training Language Model Agents via Hierarchical Multi-Turn RL29 Feb

Other references · 22

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  3. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,205
  4. 2025UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actionscited by 410
  5. 2024TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agentscited by 392
  6. 2022ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?cited by 327
  7. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learningcited by 278
  8. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 187
  9. 2018Self-Imitation Learningcited by 138
  10. 2025Where LLM Agents Fail and How They can Learn From Failurescited by 133
  11. 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 111
  12. 2024AutoManual: Constructing Instruction Manuals by LLM Agents via Interactive Environmental Learningcited by 61
10 more
  1. 2026RetroAgent: From Solving to Evolving via Retrospective Dual Intrinsic Feedbackcited by 17
  2. 2025ReCode: Unify Plan and Action for Universal Granularity Controlcited by 15
  3. 2026TimeBlind: A Spatio-Temporal Compositionality Benchmark for Video LLMscited by 11
  4. 2024Adapt2Reward: Adapting Video-Language Models to Generalizable Robotic Rewards via Failure Promptscited by 10
  5. 2026Train at Moving Edge: Online-Verified Prompt Selection for Efficient RL Training of Large Reasoning Modelcited by 10
  6. 2026SEAR: Sample Efficient Action Chunking Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  7. 2023Dataset Condensation for Recommendationcited by 4
  8. 2026Seeing Farther and Smarter: Value-Guided Multi-Path Reflection for VLM Policy Optimizationcited by 4
  9. 2026DARE: Difficulty-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning with Co-Evolved Difficulty Estimationcited by 2
  10. 2026WatchAct: A Benchmark for Behavior-Grounded Robot Manipulationcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026ChunkFlow: Towards Continuity-Consistent Chunked Policy Learning
  2. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunking
  3. 2026Dynamic Execution Horizon Prediction for Chunk-based Robot Policies
  4. 2026Action Chunking Proximal Policy Optimization with Feedback Correction
  5. 2024Empowering Large Language Model Agents through Action Learning
  6. 2025Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding
  7. 2026Adaptive Action Chunking via Multi-Chunk Q Value Estimation
  8. 2026VLA Knows Its Limits: Adaptive Execution Horizons for Robot Policies