用细粒度奖励提升大模型多轮推理能力,效果优于传统方法。
Reinforcing Multi-Turn Reasoning in LLM Agents via Fine-Grained Reward Structure and Credit Assignment
- 设计三种奖励结构,实现每轮交互的精准反馈
- 密集奖励使训练更稳定,正确率超越现有最佳方法
- 适合需要长期推理的智能体任务,如问答与游戏代理
强化学习(RL)已被广泛用于提升大语言模型(LLM)在长周期、多轮场景下的推理能力。此类交互可建模为轮次级马尔可夫决策过程(MDP),其中中间奖励常可用。然而,多数先前工作依赖稀疏的轨迹级奖励,导致信用分配不佳;而密集的轮次级奖励仍缺乏深入探索。本文研究如何有效利用密集轮次级奖励结构,在群组相对策略优化(GRPO)和近端策略优化(PPO)中实现细粒度信用分配。我们将奖励结构分为三类:(1)终局奖励;(2)延迟奖励;(3)每轮奖励,对应不同的轮次级MDP形式,并分别推导出适配的GRPO与PPO算法。在多轮搜索与游戏代理任务上的实验表明,对于GRPO与PPO,密集每轮奖励结构在训练动态与数值表现上均显著优于稀疏终局奖励与延迟奖励。此外,在搜索任务中,采用密集每轮奖励的PPO展现出更高的训练稳定性与更快收敛速度,并在多个问答数据集上达到当前最优答案正确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches have been wildly used to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Such interactions can be formalized as turn-level Markov decision processes (MDPs), where intermediate rewards are often available. However, most prior work relies on sparse trajectory-level rewards, resulting in poor credit assignment, while dense turn-level rewards remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively leverage dense turn-level reward structures in RL algorithms, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to enable fine-grained credit assignment. We categorize reward structures into three types based on their granularity: (1) terminal reward; (2) delayed reward; (3) per-turn reward, each corresponding to a distinct turn-level MDP formulation, and derive GRPO and PPO algorithms tailored to each case, respectively. Experiments on multi-turn search and game agent tasks show that, for both GRPO and PPO, dense per-turn reward structures consistently outperform sparse terminal and delayed reward structures in terms of training dynamics and numerical results. Furthermore, on search tasks, PPO with dense per-turn rewards achieves greater training stability and faster convergence, and delivers the highest answer correctness among all state-of-the-art methods across diverse question-answering datasets.
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