Machine Heart

Jun 17, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Why RL‑Trained Agents Still Fail to Reason Actively: The Information Self‑Locking Problem

The paper reveals that outcome‑based reinforcement learning often traps LLM agents in an information self‑locking regime where weak action selection and belief tracking prevent proper credit assignment, and introduces AREW, a lightweight advantage‑reweighting method that restores active reasoning across multiple tasks and models.