TRACE:面向高效智能体强化学习的统一 Rollout 预算分配框架
阅读原文· arxiv.orgTRACE 针对多轮智能体 RL 中因提示复杂度差异和仅有最终奖励导致的奖励对比度不足问题,将每个 ReAct 轮次视为语义独立节点,把预算分配从 prompt 根节点扩展到中间前缀,形成树结构 rollout。它使用可共享预测器根据前缀历史估计条件成功概率,优先向易产生混合奖励的节点分配有限采样预算,从而增强策略更新信号。在典型智能体基准上,TRACE 以相同采样成本使 Qwen3-14B 在 Multi-Hop QA 上的准确率提升 2.8 个百分点。
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing reasoning and agentic behavior in large language models. However, rollout-intensive policy optimization is often limited by insufficient reward contrast, arising when overly simple or complex prompts generate low-variance feedback and when outcome-only rewards assign the same terminal assessment to every decision in a multi-turn rollout. Past efforts have focused on allocating available rollout resources to promising prompts, yet they only leverage sample informativeness at the prompt level and neglect variation in prefix-level informativeness across turns within the same rollout. This work targets multi-turn agentic RL by modeling each ReAct-style thought-action-observation turn as a semantically distinct node, allowing budget allocation to extend from prompt roots to turn-level prefixes with further continuations, which naturally forms tree-structured rollouts. We introduce Tree Rollout Allocation for Contrastive Exploration (TRACE), a unified rollout allocation framework that enhances reward contrast within a fixed sampling budget. Technically, TRACE allocates rollout budget to both prompt roots and intermediate prefixes that are most likely to yield mixed terminal rewards. A shared generalizable predictor estimates conditional success probability at these anchors from prefix histories to guide this allocation. The resulting adaptive tree structure enriches outcome-only feedback and amplifies the policy-update signal. Empirically, TRACE achieves competitive performance and efficiency gains on typical agentic benchmarks, e.g., improving Qwen3-14B Multi-Hop QA average accuracy by 2.8 points over competitive baselines at equal sampling cost.