SOAR: Supervision from Observation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Agentic reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve long-horizon tasks by interacting with the environment and internalizing tool-use behavior into their reasoning. Prior work assigns supervision primarily based on outcome rewards or external reward models, but largely ignores environment observations, a critical source of learning. Consequently, agents may identify successful actions without understanding how the environment responds, producing suboptimal policies. To address this, we propose SOAR (Supervision from Observation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning), which assigns positive advantages to observation tokens proportional to the negative entropy of preceding actions. This encourages the agent to learn from outcomes of confident actions, grounding policy updates in environment dynamics and improving anticipation of tool-call consequences. Empirical results across three domains and 13 benchmarks show that SOAR consistently improves performance, yielding gains of up to 7.0% on general reasoning tasks and 16.9% on deep research tasks, while reducing erroneous and inefficient tool usage. 1