Divergent Paths: Learning an Outcome-Predictive Representation of LLM Agent Trajectories

arXiv:2610.19614 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-14

Updated: 2026-10-14

Comments: 9 pages, 8 pages appendix

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: In this work, we reframe agentic trajectories as paths through a shared embedding space of actions and environmental observations.

Abstract

In this work, we reframe agentic trajectories as paths through a shared embedding space of actions and environmental observations. We show that successful and failed rollouts of the same task separate in this space, with simple per-task discriminators predicting held-out rollout outcomes at up to 0.95 AUROC across three agent benchmarks and three policy models. To exploit this signal across tasks, we introduce Precog-RM, a transformer-based model that meta-learns a representation in which outcome prediction can be performed in a few-shot setting. We show that Precog-RM generalizes to unseen tasks and models, and gives confident predictions of trajectory success long before termination. Deployed as an early stopping controller for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on Tau2-Bench, Precog-RM cuts training FLOPs by up to 47.3% while maintaining performance comparable to baseline GRPO.

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