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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.20715 · updated 2026-10-18

Don't Mask the Environment: Observation Supervision Changes How Agents Explore Under RL

First page of Don't Mask the Environment: Observation Supervision Changes How Agents Explore Under RL
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.20715Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

ActObs replaces the standard SFT convention of computing loss only on agent action tokens by also supervising the environment observation tokens already present in each trajectory, before running GRPO. It adds no data, parameters, sequence tokens, or forward passes; the cost is a modified loss mask in SFT and the measured pass@1 reliability regression at 8B. It can fail when the deployment budget allows only a single sample (pass@1), since the benefit concentrates in pass@k and exploration diversity, and results are demonstrated only on Qwen3 4B/8B with GRPO on terminal and code-editing tasks.

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Why it was shortlisted

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recommendation
test
research area
coding agents
technical change
Observation-token supervision during agentic SFT
published
2026-09-17

The change is a low-cost SFT loss-mask modification compatible with a single 24 GB GPU, but the reported gains depend on sampling budget, model size, and GRPO post-training, so it merits a workload-specific A/B test rather than unconditional adoption.

About the technical core

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    ActObs replaces the standard SFT convention of computing loss only on agent action tokens by also supervising the environment observation tokens already present in each trajectory, before running GRPO. It adds no data, parameters, sequence tokens, or forward passes; the cost is a modified loss mask in SFT and the measured pass@1 reliability regression at 8B. It can fail when the deployment budget allows only a single sample (pass@1), since the benefit concentrates in pass@k and exploration diversity, and results are demonstrated only on Qwen3 4B/8B with GRPO on terminal and code-editing tasks.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    On Qwen3-4B, GRPO from ActObs achieves higher pass@k at every evaluated sampling budget than action-only SFT on Terminal-Bench 2.0; on Qwen3-8B it trades some pass@1 for +3.4 pp pass@16, and cross-domain transfer to aider-polyglot improves +4.2 pp pass@1 at 4B. All claims are pass@k percentage-point deltas, not multiplicative factors.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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quality

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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Inside the paper

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2609.20715

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