提出RTPO方法,让智能体多轮决策更稳定可靠。
RTPO: Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization for Stabilizing Agentic RL Training

- 将多轮交互构造成反向树结构,按时间逆序更新策略
- 在多轮基准测试中性能提升21.50%和10.76%
- 适合需要稳定工具调用与复杂推理的强化学习任务
使用强化学习训练多轮智能体工作流,使大语言模型能够执行复杂推理、调用外部工具并进行迭代搜索,超越单轮设置。然而,多轮强化学习训练仍极不稳定,随着回合数增加,性能常严重下降。通过理论分析,我们识别出三个紧密耦合的不稳定性来源:滚动-训练上下文错位、稀疏最终奖励下的弱回合级信用分配,以及短轨迹与长轨迹在不同策略版本下优化时产生的异步策略漂移。我们发现这些问题在扁平化轨迹优化中具有共同结构根源,并通过统一的反向回合形式加以解决。提出反向回合策略优化(RTPO),将多轮滚动数据组织为稀疏反向树结构,并按时间逆序进行回合级策略更新,使每个决策与其后续延续对齐。RTPO实现因果一致的回合级信用分配和在线策略延续,以控制异步漂移。我们提供了理论保证,证明在所提回合级框架下,RTPO可消除上下文错位与异步漂移,降低信用偏差,并收敛至递归最优。在多轮智能体强化学习基准测试中,RTPO相较于轨迹级和回合级基线分别提升21.50%和10.76%,凸显其在支持工具使用型智能体稳定训练方面的潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training multi-turn agentic workflows with reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models to perform complex reasoning, use external tools, and conduct iterative search beyond single-turn settings. Yet multi-turn RL training remains highly unstable, often causing severe performance degradation as the number of turns increases. Through theoretical analysis, we identify three tightly coupled sources of instability: rollout-training context mismatch, weak turn-level credit assignment under sparse terminal rewards, and asynchronous policy drift when short and long trajectories are optimized under different policy versions. We show that these issues share a common structural origin in flattened trajectory optimization and address them through a unified reverse-turn formulation. We propose Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization (RTPO), which organizes multi-turn rollouts as sparse reverse trees and performs turn-level policy updates in temporal reverse order, aligning each decision with its downstream continuation. RTPO enables causally consistent turn-level credit assignment and on-policy continuation to control asynchronous drift. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that RTPO eliminates context mismatch and asynchronous drift under the proposed turn-level formulation, reduces credit bias, and converges to recursive optimality. Experiments on multi-turn agentic RL benchmarks show that RTPO improves upon trajectory- and turn-level baselines by 21.50% and 10.76%, respectively, highlighting its potential to support more stable training for tool-using agents.
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