Learning to Explore: Scaling Agentic Reasoning via Exploration-Aware Policy Optimization
Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies, lacking the ability to adaptively distinguish when exploration is truly required. In this paper, we propose an exploration-aware reinforcement learning framework that enables LLM agents to adaptively explore only when uncertainty is high. Our method introduces a fine-grained reward function via variational inference that explicitly evaluates exploratory actions by estimating their potential to improve future decision-making, together with an exploration-...
| Authors | Xingyuan Hua, Sheng Yue, Ju Ren |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 May 2026 |
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