The paper introduces Coverage-conditioned Group Policy Optimization (CovGPO), a method that addresses sampling imbalance in group-based policy optimization for long-horizon agentic tasks. CovGPO applies first-visit observation coverage only when all samples in a group receive zero outcome reward, giving higher relative advantages to state-exploring actions without altering the original reward signal. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks demonstrate that CovGPO consistently outperforms group-based baselines, especially on hard tasks.
arXiv:2607. 22724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group-based policy optimization has been increasingly used to train large language model (LLM) agents from sparse outcome rewards by comparing trajectories or steps within a group.
The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.
arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2607. 04713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning holds significant potential for training large language models (LLMs) to handle multi-turn interactive 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.
arXiv:2607. 04242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective paradigm for improving large language model agents on long-horizon interactive tasks.
arXiv:2608. 19842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models.
PlanPO introduces a group planning-aware policy optimization method for multi-turn agentic large language models, addressing the issue of advantage collapse caused by treating all successful trajectories equally. By incorporating coarse-to-fine advantage signals that reflect differences in trajectory and turn lengths, PlanPO encourages agents to learn generalizable planning and generation behaviors. Experiments show a 27.2% average improvement over GRPO on benchmarks such as ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, with minimal extra training cost.
arXiv:2607. 07178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent breakthroughs of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential for complex agentic Large Language Model (LLM) tasks.
Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult. Existing approache...
arXiv:2609.36178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a promising approach for training large language model agents. However, its uniform assignment o...
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.