Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

arXiv:2609.01245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is a natural way to post-train LLM agents for long-horizon interactive tasks judged only by end-of-task verification, yet a shared belief holds that outcome-only RL soon hits a ceiling on small open models.

Recent work therefore compensates around the training with denser rewards, SFT priors, skill libraries, curated memory, or multi-agent orchestration. We argue the ceiling is an artifact of two failures of common practice.

Signal starvation: group-relative RL with sparse outcome-only rewards yields a gradient only when a task's rollout group mixes successes and failures, so under-scaled exploration silences exactly the hardest, most instructive tasks.

Policy drift: squeezing many updates out of a small task pool degrades the policy itself, as an unanchored objective lets the sampling distribution collapse exactly when saturation has already made informative groups rare.

We present CANOPY (Coverage-ANchored On-PolicY RL), a minimalist protocol attacking both directly: scale same-task exploration until the natural signal reappears, keep every update on-policy, KL-anchored, and confined to the agent's own action tokens, then cash in an enlarged interaction budget at test time.

On AppWorld, a long-horizon interactive coding benchmark, a Qwen3-14B policy trained with CANOPY through environment interaction alone--without task-specific supervision, auxiliary credit signals, or elaborate agent scaffolding--topped the public leaderboard (Feb. 2026; Test-Normal TGC 86.9, Test-Challenge 67.6), and the same design principles lift Qwen3.5-9B on SWE-bench Verified by 16.6 points.

Agentic RL alone thus internalizes long-horizon capability directly into a small open model; we plan to release the complete training stack at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/SignalCoverageRL.