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: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
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.
By Taoran Liang, Yang Liu, Shang Luo, Yingguang Yang, Rongrong Zhang, Yingzong Min, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Kefu Xu, Congjing Ran, Bin Chong
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:2608. 16156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult.
By Huan Zhang, Mingju Chen, Dongxu Zhou, Can Lv, Heng Chang, Sen Cui, Faguo Wu, Shiji Zhou
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...