arXiv Machine Learning

TIGPO: Temporal Instance-Graph Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

TIGPO (Temporal Instance-Graph Policy Optimization) extends graph-based credit assignment for long-horizon LLM agents by maintaining a persistent transition graph per task across policy updates. It allocates rollout budgets to both new exploration and revisiting past tasks, pairing current rollouts with earlier ones to create cross‑temporal references that stabilize advantage estimation. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show TIGPO consistently outperforms previous group‑based and graph‑based policy optimization methods.

arXiv AI
Oct 19

Group-Graph Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Group-Graph Policy Optimization (G2PO) is a novel group-based reinforcement learning algorithm designed for long-horizon agentic tasks. It transforms linear interaction trajectories into a global state‑transition graph, aggregates identical observations across trajectories to reduce sampling variance, and redefines actions as transitions between state nodes. By employing an edge‑centric advantage estimation and globally standardizing TD errors, G2PO identifies and prioritizes critical transitions, achieving up to 22.2% higher success rates than state‑of‑the‑art baselines on benchmarks such as WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld.

By Yunan Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Shaohan Huang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Tracking the Moving Frontier: Long-Short Term Advantage Estimator

The paper introduces Long-Short Term Advantage Estimator (LSTAE), a single‑stream reinforcement learning algorithm that replaces repeated within‑iteration trajectory sampling with historical experience for advantage estimation. LSTAE tracks each task anchor with a drift‑aware long‑term baseline and a short‑term state‑experience buffer, converting accumulated experience into multi‑granular credit signals while requiring only one rollout per anchor. Experiments on agentic and mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that LSTAE matches or surpasses strong group‑based baselines while significantly reducing rollout cost.

By Xinhao Yao, Lu Yu, Changhao Wang, Fengwei Teng, Yuyao Zhang, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou, Yong Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Beyond Trajectory-Level Attribution: Graph-Based Credit Assignment for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605. 26684v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable success in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) and have been rapidly extended to agentic tasks.

By Xin Cheng, Shuo He, Lang Feng, HaiYang Xu, Ming Yan, Lei Feng, Bo An
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

SAPO: Single-Rollout Autoregressive Policy Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy optimization (PPO) and achieving strong performance on long-horizon interactive tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

TreeHCA: Hindsight-Guided Exploration and Credit Assignment for Multi-Turn LLM Agents

TreeHCA introduces a method that couples hindsight-guided exploration with hindsight credit assignment for multi-turn large language model agents. By using changes in reference-answer likelihood to revisit intermediate histories and sample alternative continuations, it builds a tree of reasoning and tool interactions, and applies an inverse-hindsight importance correction to propagate terminal outcomes into turn-level advantages. Experiments on seven question-answering benchmarks with three Qwen backbones show that TreeHCA outperforms all baselines in aggregate exact match.

By Debajoy Mukherjee, Jeremy Carleton, Sushil Vemuri, Srinivas Shakkottai, Dileep Kalathil
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Back to the Definition: Estimating Step-Level Advantages via Trajectory Graphs for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces GRAFT, a Graph-based Faithful sTep-level credit-assignment framework that constructs a trajectory graph from rollout trajectories, recovers node state-values via Bellman iteration, and assigns step-level advantages based on node value differences. It also proposes Graph GAE to further reduce state-value estimation bias. Experiments on multi-turn agentic benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over GRPO and other recent agentic RL algorithms.

By Xincheng Yao, Haobo Fu, Weiming Liu, Chongyang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

PGPO: Potential-Guided Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic Tasks

The paper introduces Potential-Guided Policy Optimization (PGPO), a method for multi-turn agentic tasks that improves credit assignment by estimating empirical state potentials from anchor-state-group return statistics. PGPO derives action advantages from potential differences between adjacent states, enabling cross-trajectory credit propagation and finer-grained step-level credit assignment, especially within failed trajectories. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate strong performance compared to recent group-based reinforcement learning methods, with negligible training overhead.

By Yuyao Zheng, Haipeng Sun, Junwei Bao, Lemao Liu, Hongfei Jiang, Yang Song, Dejing Dou