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
arXiv:2608. 19803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Credit assignment is challenging in long-horizon agentic reinforcement learning, where supervision often comes only from final rewards.
By Bo Qian, Yuting Wu, Shuang Zeng, Huaiyu Wan, Dalin Zhang, Jiqiang Liu
arXiv:2606. 05885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents require reinforcement learning methods that can assign credit to intermediate decisions under sparse and delayed rewards.
By Yuanfan Li, Qi Zhou, Wenjing Duan, Lu Chen
PGPO: Potential-Guided Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic Tasks proposes a new reinforcement learning approach that estimates empirical state potentials from anchor-state-group return statistics within each rollout group. By deriving action advantages from potential differences between adjacent states, PGPO enables cross‑trajectory credit propagation, providing finer‑grained step‑level credit assignment, especially within failed trajectories. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate strong overall performance compared to recent group‑based RL methods, with negligible training overhead.
Group-based reinforcement learning effectively post-trains LLM agents for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks by deriving step-level credit from trajectory outcomes. However, this ties a step's credit to its rollout's final outcome: semantically near-identical intermediate steps receive opposite credit depending on whether their trajectory eventually succeeded or failed.
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...
By Dongwon Jung, Hemanth Neelgund Ramesh, Yifan Wang, Xiaomin Li, Yuexing Hao, Yu Hu, Muhao Chen, Varun Chandrasekaran, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, Jaron Lanier
arXiv:2606. 25852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning effectively post-trains LLM agents for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks by deriving step-level credit from trajectory outcomes.
By Peng Xu, Sijia Chen, Junzhuo Li, Xuming Hu
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.
By Kaibing Yang, Guangfeng Cai, Shengtian Yang, Shuo He, Yu Li, Mengyi Liu, Pengwei Chen, Jun Xu, Lei Feng
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:2605. 13217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a powerful paradigm for post-training large language model agents, yet credit assignment in multi-turn environments remains a challenge.
By Siyuan Zhu, Chao Yu, Rongxin Yang, Zongkai Liu, Jinjun Hu, Qiwen Chen, Yibo Zhang
arXiv:2610.00838v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains a large language model (LLM) to act over long, multi-step interactions. However, a single localized error...
By Xinchen Du, Zhengze Zhou, Wenhui Zhu, Han Yu, Sen Na, Rohit Jain, Alborz Geramifard
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.
By Mingxuan Fan, Peiyang Liu