RRO: LLM Agent Optimization Through Rising Reward Trajectories

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zilong, Yang, Jingfeng, Nag, Sreyashi, Varshney, Samarth, Tang, Xianfeng, Jiang, Haoming, Shang, Jingbo, Sarwar, Sheikh Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Zilong
Yang, Jingfeng
Nag, Sreyashi
Varshney, Samarth
Tang, Xianfeng
Jiang, Haoming
Shang, Jingbo
Sarwar, Sheikh Muhammad
author_facet Wang, Zilong
Yang, Jingfeng
Nag, Sreyashi
Varshney, Samarth
Tang, Xianfeng
Jiang, Haoming
Shang, Jingbo
Sarwar, Sheikh Muhammad
contents Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps which makes them likely to fail the task because of a subtle mistake in the planning trajectory. Recent approaches resort to calibrating the reasoning process through reinforcement learning. They reward or penalize every reasoning step with process supervision, as known as Process Reward Models (PRMs). However, PRMs are difficult and costly to scale up with a large number of next action candidates since they require extensive computations to acquire the training data through the per-step trajectory exploration. To mitigate this issue, we focus on the relative reward trend across successive reasoning steps and propose maintaining an increasing reward in the collected trajectories for process supervision, which we term Reward Rising Optimization (RRO). Specifically, we incrementally augment the process supervision until identifying a step exhibiting positive reward differentials, i.e. rising rewards, relative to its preceding iteration. This method dynamically expands the search space for the next action candidates, efficiently capturing high-quality data. We provide mathematical groundings and empirical results on the WebShop and InterCode-SQL benchmarks, showing that our proposed RRO achieves superior performance while requiring much less exploration cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20737
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RRO: LLM Agent Optimization Through Rising Reward Trajectories
Wang, Zilong
Yang, Jingfeng
Nag, Sreyashi
Varshney, Samarth
Tang, Xianfeng
Jiang, Haoming
Shang, Jingbo
Sarwar, Sheikh Muhammad
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps which makes them likely to fail the task because of a subtle mistake in the planning trajectory. Recent approaches resort to calibrating the reasoning process through reinforcement learning. They reward or penalize every reasoning step with process supervision, as known as Process Reward Models (PRMs). However, PRMs are difficult and costly to scale up with a large number of next action candidates since they require extensive computations to acquire the training data through the per-step trajectory exploration. To mitigate this issue, we focus on the relative reward trend across successive reasoning steps and propose maintaining an increasing reward in the collected trajectories for process supervision, which we term Reward Rising Optimization (RRO). Specifically, we incrementally augment the process supervision until identifying a step exhibiting positive reward differentials, i.e. rising rewards, relative to its preceding iteration. This method dynamically expands the search space for the next action candidates, efficiently capturing high-quality data. We provide mathematical groundings and empirical results on the WebShop and InterCode-SQL benchmarks, showing that our proposed RRO achieves superior performance while requiring much less exploration cost.
title RRO: LLM Agent Optimization Through Rising Reward Trajectories
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20737