HiMAC: Hierarchical Macro-Micro Learning for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917460080328704 |
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| author | Jin, Hongbo Zhu, Rongpeng Ding, Jiayu Luo, Guibo Li, Ge |
| author_facet | Jin, Hongbo Zhu, Rongpeng Ding, Jiayu Luo, Guibo Li, Ge |
| contents | Large language model (LLM) agents have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in interactive decision-making, yet they remain fundamentally limited in long-horizon tasks that require structured planning and reliable execution. Existing approaches predominantly rely on flat autoregressive policies, where high-level reasoning and low-level actions are generated within a single token sequence, leading to inefficient exploration and severe error propagation over extended trajectories. In this work, we propose HiMAC, a hierarchical agentic RL framework that explicitly decomposes long-horizon decision-making into macro-level planning and micro-level execution. HiMAC models reasoning as a structured blueprint generation process followed by goal-conditioned action execution, enabling robust long-horizon planning within LLM-based agents. To train this hierarchy efficiently, we introduce a critic-free hierarchical policy optimization paradigm that extends group-based reinforcement learning to bi-level structures through hierarchical relative advantage estimation. Furthermore, we propose an iterative co-evolution training strategy that alternates between planner exploration and executor adaptation, mitigating the non-stationarity inherent in hierarchical learning. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Sokoban demonstrate that HiMAC consistently outperforms strong prompting and reinforcement learning baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance and substantially improved sample efficiency across both text-based and visually grounded environments. Our results show that introducing structured hierarchy, rather than increasing model scale alone, is a key factor for enabling robust long-horizon agentic intelligence. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00977 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | HiMAC: Hierarchical Macro-Micro Learning for Long-Horizon LLM Agents Jin, Hongbo Zhu, Rongpeng Ding, Jiayu Luo, Guibo Li, Ge Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Large language model (LLM) agents have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in interactive decision-making, yet they remain fundamentally limited in long-horizon tasks that require structured planning and reliable execution. Existing approaches predominantly rely on flat autoregressive policies, where high-level reasoning and low-level actions are generated within a single token sequence, leading to inefficient exploration and severe error propagation over extended trajectories. In this work, we propose HiMAC, a hierarchical agentic RL framework that explicitly decomposes long-horizon decision-making into macro-level planning and micro-level execution. HiMAC models reasoning as a structured blueprint generation process followed by goal-conditioned action execution, enabling robust long-horizon planning within LLM-based agents. To train this hierarchy efficiently, we introduce a critic-free hierarchical policy optimization paradigm that extends group-based reinforcement learning to bi-level structures through hierarchical relative advantage estimation. Furthermore, we propose an iterative co-evolution training strategy that alternates between planner exploration and executor adaptation, mitigating the non-stationarity inherent in hierarchical learning. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Sokoban demonstrate that HiMAC consistently outperforms strong prompting and reinforcement learning baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance and substantially improved sample efficiency across both text-based and visually grounded environments. Our results show that introducing structured hierarchy, rather than increasing model scale alone, is a key factor for enabling robust long-horizon agentic intelligence. |
| title | HiMAC: Hierarchical Macro-Micro Learning for Long-Horizon LLM Agents |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00977 |