让大模型智能体在决策时更精准地选择关键节点并分配奖励。
APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

- 基于令牌不确定性与后续延续收益,精确定位重要决策点。
- 在13个基准上比现有方法平均提升近4分,且保持高效工具调用。
- 适合研究大模型智能体决策优化或需要可解释行为的场景。
近年来,代理强化学习(agentic RL)显著提升了大型语言模型智能体的多轮工具使用能力。然而,现有方法通常在粗粒度的启发式单元(如工具调用边界或固定流程)上分配信用,难以识别哪些中间决策影响下游结果。本文从‘何处分支’和‘分支后如何分配信用’两个角度研究该问题。初步分析表明,有影响力的决策点广泛分布于生成序列中,并非集中于工具调用处;仅靠令牌熵无法可靠反映其对最终结果的影响。为此,我们提出Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO),将分支与信用分配从粗粒度交互单元转移到序列中的细粒度决策点。APPO 使用结合令牌不确定性和后续延续策略增益的分支评分(Branching Score),实现更精准探索,同时过滤掉高熵但无关紧要的位置。此外,引入过程级优势缩放机制,以更好分配分支轨迹间的信用。在13个基准上的实验显示,APPO 持续优于强基线约4个百分点,同时保持高效的工具调用和行为可解释性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: \textit{where to branch and how to assign credit after branching}. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated sequence rather than concentrated at tool calls, while token entropy alone does not reliably reflect their impact on final outcomes. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization (APPO)}, which shifts branching and credit assignment from coarse interaction units to fine-grained decision points in the sequence. APPO selects branching locations using a Branching Score that combines token uncertainty with policy-induced likelihood gains of subsequent continuations, enabling more targeted exploration while filtering out spurious high-entropy positions. It further introduces procedure-level advantage scaling to better distribute credit across branched rollouts. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that APPO consistently improves strong agentic RL baselines by nearly 4 points, while keeping efficient tool-calls and maintaining behavior interpretability.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。