English

Agent models: Internalizing Chain-of-Action Generation into Reasoning models

Artificial Intelligence 2025-03-11 v1

Abstract

Traditional agentic workflows rely on external prompts to manage interactions with tools and the environment, which limits the autonomy of reasoning models. We position \emph{Large Agent Models (LAMs)} that internalize the generation of \emph{Chain-of-Action (CoA)}, enabling the model to autonomously decide when and how to use external tools. Our proposed AutoCoA framework combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), allowing the model to seamlessly switch between reasoning and action while efficiently managing environment interactions. Main components include step-level action triggering, trajectory-level CoA optimization, and an internal world model to reduce real-environment interaction costs. Evaluations on open-domain QA tasks demonstrate that AutoCoA-trained agent models significantly outperform ReAct-based workflows in task completion, especially in tasks that require long-term reasoning and multi-step actions. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/AutoCoA

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.06580,
  title  = {Agent models: Internalizing Chain-of-Action Generation into Reasoning models},
  author = {Yuxiang Zhang and Yuqi Yang and Jiangming Shu and Xinyan Wen and Jitao Sang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06580},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:12:49.246Z