arXiv Machine Learning By Zeropy Surio, Tobias Engel, Mei-Lin Chou, Anika Raman, Samuel Okafor

Same Luck, Different Choice: Twin-World Credit Assignment for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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The paper introduces TWICE (TWIn-world Credit Estimation), a method for agentic reinforcement learning that uses twin-world counterfactuals to assign credit to individual decisions within an episode. By re‑running episodes with the same sampling noise but different decisions, TWICE produces unbiased turn‑level advantages for policy‑gradient updates, reducing the number of rollouts needed compared to independent counterfactuals. Experiments on seven question‑answering benchmarks show that TWICE improves exact match scores for GRPO by 5.3 and 4.5 points on Qwen2.5‑3B and 7B, outperforms tree‑search and counterfactual‑branching baselines, and requires 68% fewer auxiliary tokens than VinePPO.

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