提出BranPO方法,让智能体在长序列任务中更高效地学习正确决策。
BranPO: Scalable Contrastive Branch Sampling for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning
- 通过截断轨迹生成对比分支,隔离影响成败的关键决策
- 在多跳问答任务上超越多种基线,且无需额外训练成本
- 适合需要长期规划的复杂推理任务,如多步工具调用
代理强化学习使大语言模型能够进行多轮规划与工具使用,但在稀疏的轨迹级奖励下,长时程训练仍具挑战性。传统方法依赖树状探索或过程评估提供细粒度监督,但常伴随高开销或噪声信号。在代理轨迹中,早期错误可能被后续动作修正,而看似良好的中间状态也可能因后续决策失败。我们称之为非单调正确性,这使得结果奖励或状态价值无法有效指导每个状态应采取的动作。为此,我们提出无价值的分支相对策略优化(BranPO),通过在中间前缀处截断轨迹并重采样延续部分,构建共享前缀但结果不同的对比分支,从而分离决定成败的关键决策。我们进一步引入难度感知分支采样和冗余步骤掩码,提升采样效率并抑制冗余更新。实验表明,BranPO在多个多跳问答基准上持续优于各类基线,且无需额外训练成本,并在更广泛的长时程代理任务中实现一致改进。代码已公开于https://github.com/YubaoZhao/BranPO。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Agentic reinforcement learning enables large language models to perform multi-turn planning and tool use, but long-horizon training remains challenging under sparse trajectory-level rewards, where a single outcome is uniformly assigned to all decisions. Prior methods introduce finer-grained supervision via tree-based exploration or process-level evaluation, but often incur high cost or produce noisy credit signals. In agentic trajectories, early mistakes may still be corrected by later actions, while seemingly promising intermediate states can fail due to poor subsequent decisions. We call this property non-monotonic correctness, which makes outcome rewards or state values insufficient for guiding what actions should be taken from each state. To address this, we propose Branching Relative Policy Optimization (\textbf{BranPO}), a value-free method that constructs localized contrastive supervision without dense rewards. BranPO truncates trajectories at intermediate prefixes and resamples continuations to form contrastive branches that share the same prefix but diverge in final outcomes, thereby isolating decisions that drive success or failure. We further introduce difficulty-aware branch sampling and Redundant Step Masking to improve sampling efficiency and suppress redundant updates. Experiments show that BranPO consistently outperforms diverse baseline categories across multiple multi-hop QA benchmarks without additional training cost, and generalizes to broader long-horizon agentic tasks with consistent improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/YubaoZhao/BranPO.
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