arXiv Machine Learning

MACCA: Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Causal Credit Assignment

arXiv:2312. 03644v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is valuable in scenarios where online interaction is impractical or risky.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

IAPO: Influence-Aware Policy Optimization for Credit Assignment in Multi-Turn Service Agents

The paper introduces Influence-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), a method that models multi‑turn agent rollouts as typed influence‑dependency graphs to better assign credit to actions based on how information and errors flow through user and tool interactions. IAPO transforms the structure of support and failure usage into routing weights that redistribute trajectory‑level advantage, enabling more effective learning from sparse final rewards. Experiments with Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B on three service‑agent benchmarks show that IAPO outperforms existing multi‑turn reinforcement learning baselines without harming function‑calling performance.

By Bo Ren, Yirong Mao, Yi Yang, Wenhui Que
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Who Deserves the Reward? SHARP: Shapley Credit-based Optimization for Multi-Agent System

arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.

By Yanming Li, Xuelin Zhang, WenJie Lu, Ziye Tang, Maodong Wu, Haotian Luo, Tongtong Wu, Zijie Peng, Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, Naiqiang Tan, Chao Huang, Lian Peng, Li Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

Independent Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Counterfactual Semantic-Social World Models

The paper introduces CASTLE, a framework for fully decentralized multi‑agent reinforcement learning that uses two offline‑trained world models to provide in‑context guidance to independent agents. A Local Dynamics World Model captures each agent’s trajectory dynamics, while a Semantic‑Social World Model predicts short‑horizon task and social outcomes for candidate actions based on counterfactual simulator rollouts. During online learning, these frozen models supply prediction logits to an independent PPO policy, enabling agents to compare potential actions prospectively rather than relying solely on scalar rewards. CASTLE outperforms existing baselines on several multi‑particle benchmark tasks, achieving the highest mean final scores across 30 seeds.

By Fernando Martinez, Tao Li, Yingdong Lu, Juntao Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2607. 13988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn agents solve complex tasks through extended sequences of tool interactions before producing a final answer, making credit assignment a fundamental challenge during post-training.

By Leitian Tao, Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Tao Ge, Hao Cheng, Mike Hang Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Sharon Li
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603. 21563v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding.

By Zhongyi Li, Wan Tian, Yikun Ban, Jinju Chen, Huiming Zhang, Yang Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

ArenaFlow: From Trajectory Ranking to Hierarchical Credit Propagation for Open-Ended Agent RL

ArenaFlow is a hierarchical credit propagation framework designed to improve reinforcement learning for open-ended agent tasks. It uses tournament-based relative ranking to generate trajectory-level rewards and structured reflective evaluation to identify pivotal success steps, reusable strategy skills, and skill usage attribution. The framework propagates advantages to high-confidence steps and maintains a global skill memory, enabling more targeted optimization and reusable skill priors for future exploration.

By Qiang Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Fanrui Zhang, Xi Chen, Boli Chen, Shihang Wang, Yinfeng Huang, Yi Zheng, Pengjun Xie, Kaipeng Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv AI
Aug 7

AgentOPSD: Recursive Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 05987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks.

By Zi-Han Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Zhiyuan Yao, Jinyang Wu, Jie Wu, Zhengzhou Cai, Yueqing Sun, Ziang Ye, Linji Hao, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Yongliang Shen, Yujiu Yang