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 (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 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
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
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
Group-Graph Policy Optimization (G2PO) is a novel group-based reinforcement learning algorithm designed for long-horizon agentic tasks. It transforms linear interaction trajectories into a global state‑transition graph, aggregates identical observations across trajectories to reduce sampling variance, and redefines actions as transitions between state nodes. By employing an edge‑centric advantage estimation and globally standardizing TD errors, G2PO identifies and prioritizes critical transitions, achieving up to 22.2% higher success rates than state‑of‑the‑art baselines on benchmarks such as WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld.
By Yunan Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Shaohan Huang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
The paper introduces Milestone Viability Potential Policy Optimization (MVPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed for long‑horizon large language model agents. MVPO addresses the zero‑credit failure problem by learning from viable failure prefixes, estimating prefix potential over Union‑Find viability regions, and repairing zero‑credit groups with potential‑difference advantages. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B‑Instruct demonstrate that MVPO outperforms eight strong baselines, improving success rates on ALFWorld and WebShop with minimal overhead.
By Qi Zhou, Yuanfan Li
arXiv:2605. 26684v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable success in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) and have been rapidly extended to agentic tasks.
By Xin Cheng, Shuo He, Lang Feng, HaiYang Xu, Ming Yan, Lei Feng, Bo An
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
arXiv:2610.17666v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for multi-turn agents relies on sparse terminal rewards that say little about individual steps....
By Xuyan Ye, Xiyan Fu, Shengda Fan, Jiawei Cui, Yankai Lin, Wei Lu
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly solve long-horizon tasks through multi-turn interactions with users and external tools. In these settings, relevant task information often unfolds over t...
arXiv:2605. 17877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A significant hurdle for current LLMs is the execution of complex, multi-stage tasks.
By Wonjoong Kim, Yeonjun In, Sangwu Park, Dongha Lee, Chanyoung Park