让智能体相信自己是对的,而非只看行动结果,提升长任务决策可靠性。
Rewarding Beliefs, Not Actions: Consistency-Guided Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Agents

- 用信念状态建模历史,引导策略学习
- 信念不一致生成密集自监督信号,提升样本效率2.1倍
- 适合长时序、部分可观测环境下的智能体训练
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)是提升大语言模型在长时序交互任务中表现的有前景方向。然而,在部分可观测环境中,观测不完整导致智能体信念随时间漂移,而延迟奖励掩盖了中间决策的因果影响,加剧了时间信用分配难题。为此,我们提出ReBel(Reward Belief),一种过程级强化学习算法,显式建模结构化信念状态以总结交互历史,并指导后续策略学习。ReBel引入信念一致性监督,将预测信念与观察反馈之间的差异转化为密集的自监督信号,无需外部步骤级标注或验证器。同时采用信念感知分组,比较相似信念状态下的轨迹,获得更稳健、方差更低的优势估计。我们在复杂长时序基准测试(包括ALFWorld和WebShop)上评估ReBel,其任务成功率相比基线GRPO最高提升20.4个百分点,样本效率提高2.1倍。结果表明,信念感知自监督是应对部分可观测性下可靠长时序决策的可行方向。代码已公开:https://github.com/Fateyetian/Rebel.git。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) agents on long-horizon interactive tasks. However, in partially observable environments, incomplete observations cause agent beliefs to drift over time, while delayed rewards obscure the causal impact of intermediate decisions, exacerbating temporal credit assignment challenges. To address this, we propose ReBel (Reward Belief), a process-level reinforcement learning algorithm that explicitly models structured belief states to summarize interaction history and guide subsequent policy learning. ReBel introduces belief-consistency supervision, converting discrepancies between predicted beliefs and observed feedback into dense self-supervised signals without requiring external step-wise annotations or verifiers. It also employs belief-aware grouping to compare trajectories under similar belief states, yielding more robust and lower-variance advantage estimates. We evaluate ReBel on challenging long-horizon benchmarks, including ALFWorld and WebShop. ReBel improves task success by up to $20.4$ percentage points over the episode-level baseline GRPO and increases sample efficiency by $2.1\times$. These results suggest that belief-aware self-supervision is a promising direction for reliable long-horizon decision-making under partial observability. Code is available at: https://github.com/Fateyetian/Rebel.git.
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