让智能体强化学习更关注关键步骤,提升复杂任务成功率。
StepOPSD: Step-Aware Online Preference Self-Distillation for Agent Reinforcement Learning

- 以动作步骤为单位重新分配奖励,精准定位影响结果的关键决策。
- 在ALFWorld和Search-QA上多个任务达最佳或第二名,如PickTwo达95.0%。
- 发现局部信任区域和全局混合强度的双重调控规律,适配高敏感任务。
多轮智能体的强化学习面临信用分配错位问题:奖励稀疏且以轨迹为单位,但成功常取决于少数局部决策。现有在线策略蒸馏(OPD)虽提供更密集的词级监督,却通常将异构轨迹视为整体字符串而非因果交互单元。我们提出StepOPSD,一种后回放偏好自蒸馏框架,以智能体步骤为信用重分配单位。StepOPSD将轨迹分解为以动作为中心的步骤片段,在事后增强的教师上下文中重评分,并在GRPO更新前,将词级概率差异转化为保号优势调节,使用归一化的每步信用预算。在ALFWorld和Search-QA上,基于Qwen3-1.7B和Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct,StepOPSD在对局部因果错误最敏感的子集上取得最佳或次优表现,包括ALFWorld Heat(79.1%)、PickTwo(95.0%)、Search-QA TriviaQA(61.6%)第一,以及HotpotQA(40.4%)并列最佳。结果揭示出稳定的双旋钮规律:较小的α_clip作为广义稳定局部信任区域,而最优全局混合强度λ_mix则依赖任务。这表明当轨迹级奖励与决定下游成功的局部动作弱相关时,步骤感知蒸馏最具价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser token-level supervision, but typically treats heterogeneous agent trajectories as monolithic strings rather than causal interaction units. We present StepOPSD, a post-rollout preference self-distillation framework that takes the agent step as the unit of credit redistribution. StepOPSD decomposes trajectories into action-centered step segments, rescoring them under hindsight-enriched teacher contexts and converting token-level log-probability gaps into sign-preserving advantage shaping with a normalized per-step credit budget before the GRPO update. Across ALFWorld and Search-QA with Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, StepOPSD attains best or second-best results on subsets most sensitive to local causal errors, including first-place performance on ALFWorld Heat (79.1%), PickTwo (95.0%), Search-QA TriviaQA (61.6%), and tied-best performance on HotpotQA (40.4%). The results further reveal a consistent two-knob law: smaller α_clip acts as a broadly stabilizing local trust region, whereas the optimal global mixing strength λ_mix remains task-dependent. These findings suggest that step-aware distillation is most useful when trajectory-level rewards are weakly aligned with the local action that determines downstream success.
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