APPO:智能体过程策略优化
阅读原文· arxiv.org现有智能体强化学习多基于工具调用边界等粗粒度单元分配回报。APPO将分支与信用分配迁移至序列中的细粒度决策点:通过分支分数(结合token不确定性与后续延续的策略诱导似然增益)选择分支位置,过滤高熵噪声;引入过程级优势缩放优化分支轨迹间的信用分布。在13个基准测试上,APPO在保持工具调用效率和行为可解释性的前提下,将强基线性能平均提升近4个点。
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: 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 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.