Glossary · Term

template collapse

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Definition

When an AI agent's reasoning ends up looking the same on every problem because training has stamped it into a single shape.

A failure mode in agentic RL where the policy retains within-input output diversity but loses mutual information between input and reasoning trace, producing fluent-looking but input-agnostic templates; detectable via cross-prompt likelihood scoring even when entropy looks healthy.

Mentioned in 1 episode

  1. 010
    When Reward Climbs But Reasoning Goes Generic: Diagnosing Template Collapse in Agentic RL