Iterative GRPO is a batch‑online policy iteration framework that enables multi‑turn reinforcement learning for conversational agents without requiring an interactive user simulator. It alternates between learning a turn‑level Q‑function from logged returns (policy evaluation) and applying single‑turn GRPO against this Q‑function (policy improvement), thereby scoring candidate responses by their expected downstream return. The method is validated on six multi‑turn negotiation environments, demonstrating its practicality for real‑world deployment patterns.
By Daniel R. Jiang, Ankur Samanta, Yukai Yang, Jalaj Bhandari, R\'emi Munos, Tyler Lu
Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs). Previous RL pipelines for LLMs were mostly synchronous and batch-interleaved, which is inefficient for long-horizon agentic tasks.
arXiv:2607. 07508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs).
By Zhenyu Hou, Yujiang Li, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
arXiv:2606. 03892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training LLMs to orchestrate multi-step tool calls is held back by three coupled obstacles: realistic stateful execution environments are costly to build, synthetic training queries are often detached from the server's actual state (so the generated tool calls fail to execute), and recall-based RL rewards incentivize verbose tool-calling patterns.
By Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Asim Munawar, Kinjal Basu, Maxwell Crouse, Chulaka Gunasekara, Suneet Katrekar, Pavan Kapanipathi
arXiv:2607. 15610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for training LLM agents, yet popular methods such as GRPO/RLOO rely on multiple independently sampled complete trajectories for advantage estimation.
By Xintong Li, Sha Li, Yuwei Zhang, Changlong Yu, Rongmei Lin, Hongye Jin, Shuyi Guan, Xin Liu, Linwei Li, Qingyu Yin, Jingbo Shang
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
Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, such as GRPO and its variants, have become a leading paradigm for training reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs). While their group-normal...
The paper introduces Reverse‑Turn Policy Optimization (RTPO), a method that restructures multi‑turn agentic reinforcement learning rollouts into sparse reverse trees and updates policies in temporal reverse order. This approach addresses three key instability sources—context mismatch, weak turn‑level credit assignment, and asynchronous policy drift—by aligning each decision with its downstream continuation. Theoretical analysis shows RTPO eliminates context mismatch and drift, reduces credit bias, and converges to recursive optimality, while experiments demonstrate performance gains of 21.50% over trajectory‑level and 10.76% over turn‑level baselines on multi‑turn agentic RL benchmarks.
By Yugu Li, Jimmy Cao, Jianglin Qiao, Siyi Hu
arXiv:2608.22167v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective way to improve the tool-use ability of large language models (LLMs), but most existing RL framework...
By Ziyang Luo, Yan Yang, Xiangru Jian, Ziji Shi, Xiaoqiang Lin, Jun Hao Liew, Silvio Savarese, Junnan Li
arXiv:2606. 26997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) post-training for reasoning increasingly relies on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where models learn from ground-truth feedback on mathematical, logical, and scientific tasks.
By Rongjian Chen, Jianmin Hu, Kejiang Ye, Minxian Xu
arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.
By Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Seungju Han, Sheng Liu, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Pan Lu
arXiv:2608. 12253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning for human-AI interaction typically relies on a single large language model to simulate user behavior.
By Simon Yu, Nicholas Tomlin, Marwa Abdulhai, Ximing Lu, Derek Chong, Abe Hou, Dilara Soylu, Sergey Levine, Christopher D. Manning, Weiyan Shi