arXiv AI
Sep 25

Back to the Definition: Estimating Step-Level Advantages via Trajectory Graphs for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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 AI
Sep 3

PGPO: Potential-Guided Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic 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.

By Yuyao Zheng, Haipeng Sun, Junwei Bao, Lemao Liu, Hongfei Jiang, Yang Song, Dejing Dou