{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Daily Paper Cast","title":"Spreadsheet-RL: Advancing Large Language Model Agents on Realistic Spreadsheet Tasks via Reinforcement Learning","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1345,"description":"\n 🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.AI\n\n Authors:\n Banghao Chi, Yining Xie, Mingyuan Wu, Jingcheng Yang, Jize Jiang, Zhaoheng Li, Shengyi Qian, Minjia Zhang, Klara Nahrstedt, Rui Hou, Xiangjun Fan, Hanchao Yu\n\n Title:\n Spreadsheet-RL: Advancing Large Language Model Agents on Realistic Spreadsheet Tasks via Reinforcement Learning\n\n Arxiv:\n http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22642v1\n\n Abstract:\n Spreadsheet systems (e.g., Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets) play a central role in modern data-centric workflows. As AI agents grow increasingly capable of automating complex tasks, such as controlling computers and generating presentations, building an AI-driven spreadsheet agent has emerged as a promising research direction. Most existing spreadsheet agents rely on specialized prompting over general-purpose LLMs; while this design has potentials on simple spreadsheet operations, it struggles to manage the complex, multi-step workflows typical of real-world applications. We introduce Spreadsheet-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning framework designed to train specialized spreadsheet agents within a realistic Microsoft Excel environment. Spreadsheet-RL features an automated pipeline for scalable collection of paired start-goal spreadsheets from online forums, as well as domain-specific evaluation tasks in areas such as finance and supply chain management, which we compile into the new Domain-Spreadsheet benchmark dataset. It also includes a Spreadsheet Gym environment designed for multi-turn RL: Spreadsheet Gym exposes extensive Excel functionality through a Python sandbox, along with a refined harness that incorporates a comprehensive tool set and carefully designed tool-routing rules for spreadsheet tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that Spreadsheet-RL substantially enhances AI agent's performance on both general and domain-specific spreadsheet tasks: it improves...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8lOVNnuwhrA3rxrDMv7Osu4j_t1-jORooO6NfGcQhcw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Zjg1/YzRhODczMDU4MmE4/OGMwN2FiNDlmYzI2/MDliMi5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}