让语言智能体自己生成奖励信号,边行动边优化策略。
Co-Evolution of Policy and Internal Reward for Language Agents
- 用自身生成的内部奖励指导推理时的行为选择。
- 训练中将同一信号转为步骤级奖励,提升策略优化效率。
- 在三个基准上比仅用外部奖励的模型提升8%。
大型语言模型(LLM)智能体通过与环境交互进行学习,但长周期任务仍受稀疏且延迟的奖励严重制约。现有方法多依赖事后信用分配或外部奖励模型,难以在推理时提供有效指导,且常将奖励改进与策略改进分离。本文提出Self-Guide,一种由智能体自生成的内部奖励机制,在推理时作为短时自我引导信号以指导下一步动作,并在训练时转化为逐步内部奖励,实现更密集的策略优化。该机制形成政策与内部奖励的协同进化循环:更好的策略产生更优引导,更优引导又进一步提升策略。在三个智能体基准测试中,推理时的自我引导已带来显著提升;而结合GRPO联合优化策略与内部奖励,相比仅使用环境奖励的基线模型进一步提升8%。结果表明,语言智能体不仅能通过积累更多经验改进,还能在行动与学习过程中自主生成并优化内部奖励。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit assignment or external reward models, which provide limited guidance at inference time and often separate reward improvement from policy improvement. We propose Self-Guide, a self-generated internal reward for language agents that supports both inference-time guidance and training-time supervision. Specifically, the agent uses Self-Guide as a short self-guidance signal to steer the next action during inference, and converts the same signal into step-level internal reward for denser policy optimization during training. This creates a co-evolving loop: better policy produces better guidance, and better guidance further improves policy as internal reward. Across three agent benchmarks, inference-time self-guidance already yields clear gains, while jointly evolving policy and internal reward with GRPO brings further improvements (8\%) over baselines trained solely with environment reward. Overall, our results suggest that language agents can improve not only by collecting more experience, but also by learning to generate and refine their own internal reward during acting and learning.
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