提出分层组策略优化,解决长程智能体任务中优势估计偏差问题。
Hierarchy-of-Groups Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks
- 按历史上下文一致性将每步分配到多个层级组,实现细粒度策略更新。
- 在ALFWorld和WebShop上,性能超越现有方法,相同计算成本下提升显著。
- 无需额外模型或采样,通过自适应加权聚合提升优势估计准确性。
基于群体的强化学习(如GRPO)已显著提升大语言模型在长程智能体任务中的能力。近期研究趋向于逐步群体策略优化,即独立处理轨迹中每一步,同时利用记忆模块保留历史上下文。然而我们发现,逐步相对优势估计存在关键问题——上下文不一致:同一组内的步骤可能具有不同历史背景。实证表明,这一问题会导致严重的优势估计偏差,显著损害策略优化效果。为此,本文提出分层组策略优化(HGPO),在一组轨迹内,根据历史上下文一致性将每一步分配至多个层级组;对每一步,在各组内分别计算优势,并通过自适应加权方案聚合。该方法在不引入额外模型或采样条件下,实现更优的偏差-方差平衡。在两个挑战性任务ALFWorld和WebShop上,使用Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct和Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct进行评估,结果表明HGPO在相同计算约束下显著优于现有智能体强化学习方法。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Group-based reinforcement learning (RL), such as GRPO, has advanced the capabilities of large language models on long-horizon agentic tasks. To enable more fine-grained policy updates, recent research has increasingly shifted toward stepwise group-based policy optimization, which treats each step in a rollout trajectory independently while using a memory module to retain historical context. However, we find a key issue in estimating stepwise relative advantages, namely context inconsistency, where steps within the same group may differ in their historical contexts. Empirically, we reveal that this issue can lead to severely biased advantage estimation, thereby degrading policy optimization significantly. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose Hierarchy-of-Groups Policy Optimization (HGPO) for long-horizon agentic tasks. Specifically, within a group of rollout trajectories, HGPO assigns each step to multiple hierarchical groups according to the consistency of historical contexts. Then, for each step, HGPO computes distinct advantages within each group and aggregates them with an adaptive weighting scheme. In this way, HGPO can achieve a favorable bias-variance trade-off in stepwise advantage estimation, without extra models or rollouts. Evaluations on two challenging agentic tasks, ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, show that HGPO significantly outperforms existing agentic RL methods under the same computational constraints. Code is available at https://github.com/langfengQ/verl-agent/tree/master/recipe/hgpo.
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