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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Unleashing Implicit Rewards: Prefix-Value Learning for Distribution-Level Optimization

The paper introduces the Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which learns the probability of eventual correctness for each prefix directly from outcome labels, thereby aligning training targets with inference-time step signals via temporal-difference differences. IPVRM improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. Additionally, the authors propose Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), a policy optimization method that applies TD advantages to both sampled and high-probability tokens, offering dense counterfactual updates without extra rollouts, and show that DistRL consistently enhances downstream reasoning when combined with IPVRM.

By Shiping Gao, Hongzhan Chen, Xiaojun Quan, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Beyond Trajectory-Level Attribution: Graph-Based Credit Assignment for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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 AI
5d ago

Group-Graph Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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