arXiv Machine Learning

Granularity-Adaptive Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces GACA, a critic‑free reinforcement learning estimator that adapts credit assignment granularity based on a step‑level uncertainty proxy. GACA assigns higher weight to fine‑grained signals for steps with above‑average negative log‑likelihood, while relying on episode‑level signals for less uncertain steps, improving task success on ALFWorld and WebShop for 1.5B and 7B language models. The authors provide a risk decomposition, a conditional bound on action‑value variation, and an error‑projection analysis to justify the method’s effectiveness.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606. 28707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), avoids training a value function (critic) and reduces memory and compute overhead relative to critic-based PPO pipelines for aligning large language models.

By Yupeng Chang, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
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.