arXiv:2602.16165cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 10

让大模型在复杂任务中分步规划、精准执行,提升长周期决策能力。

HiPER: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Credit Assignment for Large Language Model Agents

  • 将大模型决策分为高层规划与低层执行,分阶段生成子目标并完成动作序列。
  • 在ALFWorld和WebShop上分别达到97.4%和83.3%成功率,优于之前方法6.6%和8.3%。
  • 适合需要多步骤依赖的复杂交互任务,尤其擅长长周期、稀疏奖励场景。

将大语言模型训练为多轮交互式智能体仍具挑战性,尤其在长周期任务中,奖励稀疏且延迟,智能体需执行一系列动作后才能获得反馈。现有强化学习方法通常将大模型视为单一时间尺度的扁平策略,每步仅选择一个动作。在稀疏奖励环境下,这类策略必须在整个轨迹中传播信用,缺乏显式的时序抽象,常导致优化不稳定和信用分配效率低下。本文提出HiPER——一种基于显式信用分配的层次化强化学习框架,将策略分解为高层规划器(提出子目标)和低层执行器(在多个动作步骤中实现子目标)。为此引入层次优势估计(HAE),在规划与执行两个层级分别精确分配信用。通过聚合每个子目标的回报并协调两层更新,HAE提供无偏梯度估计,并在理论上降低方差。实验证明,HiPER在挑战性交互基准上表现卓越:在ALFWorld上达到97.4%成功,在WebShop上达83.3%,均优于此前最佳方法(+6.6%和+8.3%),尤其在涉及多个依赖子任务的长周期任务中提升显著。结果表明,显式的层次分解对可扩展的大模型多轮强化学习至关重要。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful feedback. Most existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches model LLM agents as flat policies operating at a single time scale, selecting one action at each turn. In sparse-reward settings, such flat policies must propagate credit across the entire trajectory without explicit temporal abstraction, which often leads to unstable optimization and inefficient credit assignment. We propose HiPER, a novel Hierarchical Plan-Execute RL framework that explicitly separates high-level planning from low-level execution. HiPER factorizes the policy into a high-level planner that proposes subgoals and a low-level executor that carries them out over multiple action steps. To align optimization with this structure, we introduce a key technique called hierarchical advantage estimation (HAE), which carefully assigns credit at both the planning and execution levels. By aggregating returns over the execution of each subgoal and coordinating updates across the two levels, HAE provides an unbiased gradient estimator and provably reduces variance compared to flat generalized advantage estimation. Empirically, HiPER achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging interactive benchmarks, reaching 97.4\% success on ALFWorld and 83.3\% on WebShop with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (+6.6\% and +8.3\% over the best prior method), with especially large gains on long-horizon tasks requiring multiple dependent subtasks. These results highlight the importance of explicit hierarchical decomposition for scalable RL training of multi-turn LLM agents.

强化学习大模型代理分层决策稀疏奖励

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