TRACE improves long-horizon agent tool use without heavy supervised pretraining
burkov · x · 2026-07-21
Microsoft Research and UW–Madison introduce TRACE, a new credit-assignment method for long-horizon agent tool use.
- TRACE uses log-ratio state values and temporal-difference changes.
- It improves performance on complex search benchmarks.
- The method does not require extensive supervised pretraining or specialized critics.
- The post points to the paper as a practical way to make reinforcement-learning agents better at long tool-use sequences.
Related event: TRACE: A New Credit Assignment Method for Long-Horizon Agents(3 posts)→
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