Paper arXiv:2610.18868 · cs.CL · Submitted · PDF ↗
Research paper
Tev: Scaling Long-Horizon Agentic Environments with Dense Progress Rewards
Wenbo Hu, Shraman Pramanick, Krishna Kumar Singh, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Yong Jae Lee
Abstract
Long-horizon agents have drawn growing attention for their ability to work autonomously -- from hours to days -- on economically valuable tasks, a capability essential to automated discovery and recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet open-source models still struggle on long-horizon tasks, largely for lack of both training data and a working recipe, and scaling both is hard: long, complex tasks are difficult to curate and verify, and their rewards are sparse. We address both. First, we introduce Tev-Gym, the first long-horizon agent training dataset with verifiable, dense, progressive rewards -- 1,170 verified task environments across 7 domains. It is built on a latent-world-first approach that first constructs a latent world: a complete and correct hidden specification of the task domain, workflow, and expected state after each step. Each task is then progressively rendered from this specification into an agent-facing environment, enabling controllable complexity and a natural progress metric. Second, we turn this metric into a training recipe: via progress-potential reward shaping (PPRS), we convert progress into a dense per-step reward that improves training efficiency and makes otherwise-intractable tasks trainable. Training with this recipe yields Tev-27B, which achieves substantial gains on the Agents' Last Exam computing and math sciences domains (ALE-CM), matching GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5 at Pass@5. Despite training only on ALE-related data, it generalizes to the Terminal-Bench (TB) 3.0 and 4.0 subsets, surpassing GLM 5.2 and Gemini 3.7 Flash, and reaches Claude Opus 4.8-level performance on middle-horizon tasks such as TB 2.1.
The paper
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