用信息增益做奖励,让多轮搜索智能体每步都能学到东西。
Information Gain-based Policy Optimization: A Simple and Effective Approach for Multi-Turn Search Agents
- 每一步都根据模型对答案的信念提升来给奖励
- 在多轮任务中准确率显著高于基线,数据利用效率更高
- 无需外部奖励模型,适合长程推理场景
基于大语言模型的智能体通过强化学习训练,以增强其在工具使用和多轮推理中的环境交互能力。然而,现有方法依赖仅在最终输出时才提供的结果奖励,导致奖励稀疏,在多轮任务中引发三大问题:优势消失、中间步骤无法精准归因、样本效率低下。本文提出信息增益策略优化(IGPO),将每轮交互视为逐步获取真实答案信息的过程,定义每步奖励为策略产生正确答案概率的边际提升。该奖励源自模型自身信念更新,无需外部奖励模型或昂贵蒙特卡洛估计。结合最终结果监督,形成密集奖励信号。在域内与域外基准测试中,IGPO持续优于强基线,显著提升准确率与数据效率。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require multi-turn reasoning and knowledge acquisition. However, existing approaches typically rely on outcome-based rewards that are only provided exclusively upon generating the final answer. This reward sparsity becomes particularly problematic in multi-turn settings, where long trajectories exacerbate three critical issues: (i) advantage collapse, where all rollouts receive identical rewards and provide no useful learning signals; (ii) lack of fine-grained credit assignment, where the correctness of intermediate turns is obscured, especially in long-horizon tasks; and (iii) poor sample efficiency, where each rollout yields only a single outcome signal, leading to low data utilization. In this paper, we propose Information Gain-based Policy Optimization (IGPO), a simple yet effective RL framework that provides dense and intrinsic supervision for multi-turn agent training. IGPO models each interaction turn as an incremental process of acquiring information about the ground truth, and defines turn-level rewards as the marginal increase in the policy's probability of producing the correct answer. Unlike prior process-level reward approaches that depend on external reward models or costly Monte Carlo estimation, IGPO derives intrinsic rewards directly from the model's own belief updates. These intrinsic turn-level rewards are combined with outcome-level supervision to form dense reward signals. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that IGPO consistently outperforms strong baselines in multi-turn scenarios, achieving higher accuracy and improved data efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/GuoqingWang1/IGPO.
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