A$^2$TGPO: Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Dingwei, Zong, Zefang, Ma, Zhipeng, Luo, Leo, Li, Yang, Li, Chengming, Chen, Peng, Jiang, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chen, Dingwei
Zong, Zefang
Ma, Zhipeng
Luo, Leo
Li, Yang
Li, Chengming
Chen, Peng
Jiang, Jie
author_facet Chen, Dingwei
Zong, Zefang
Ma, Zhipeng
Luo, Leo
Li, Yang
Li, Chengming
Chen, Peng
Jiang, Jie
contents Reinforcement learning for agentic large language models (LLMs) typically relies on a sparse, trajectory-level outcome reward, making it difficult to evaluate the contribution of individual tool-calls within multi-turn interactions. Existing approaches to such process credit assignment either depend on separate external process reward models that introduce additional consumption, or tree-based structural rollout that merely redistributes the outcome signal while constraining trajectory diversity. A promising alternative leverages the per-turn change in the policy's predicted probability of the ground-truth, termed Information Gain (IG), as an intrinsic process signal without an external evaluator. However, prior work on leveraging IG signals within the RL training loop faces three systematic challenges: normalizing across turns that face heterogeneous positional contexts can distort the relative standing of individual turns, accumulating a variable number of terms causes advantage magnitudes to drift with trajectory depth, and a fixed clipping range governs policy updates identically for turns with vastly different IG signals. In this paper, we propose A$^2$TGPO (Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping), which retains IG as the intrinsic signal but re-designs how it is normalized, accumulated, and consumed: (i) turn-group normalization: normalizes IG within each (prompt, turn-index) group so that each turn is compared only against peers at the same interaction depth; (ii) variance-rescaled discounted accumulation: divides cumulative normalized IG by square root of accumulated terms to keep advantage magnitudes comparable across turn positions; and (iii) adaptive turn-level clipping: modulates each turn's clipping range based on its normalized IG, widening the update region for informative turns and narrowing it for uninformative ones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06200
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A$^2$TGPO: Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping
Chen, Dingwei
Zong, Zefang
Ma, Zhipeng
Luo, Leo
Li, Yang
Li, Chengming
Chen, Peng
Jiang, Jie
Computation and Language
Reinforcement learning for agentic large language models (LLMs) typically relies on a sparse, trajectory-level outcome reward, making it difficult to evaluate the contribution of individual tool-calls within multi-turn interactions. Existing approaches to such process credit assignment either depend on separate external process reward models that introduce additional consumption, or tree-based structural rollout that merely redistributes the outcome signal while constraining trajectory diversity. A promising alternative leverages the per-turn change in the policy's predicted probability of the ground-truth, termed Information Gain (IG), as an intrinsic process signal without an external evaluator. However, prior work on leveraging IG signals within the RL training loop faces three systematic challenges: normalizing across turns that face heterogeneous positional contexts can distort the relative standing of individual turns, accumulating a variable number of terms causes advantage magnitudes to drift with trajectory depth, and a fixed clipping range governs policy updates identically for turns with vastly different IG signals. In this paper, we propose A$^2$TGPO (Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping), which retains IG as the intrinsic signal but re-designs how it is normalized, accumulated, and consumed: (i) turn-group normalization: normalizes IG within each (prompt, turn-index) group so that each turn is compared only against peers at the same interaction depth; (ii) variance-rescaled discounted accumulation: divides cumulative normalized IG by square root of accumulated terms to keep advantage magnitudes comparable across turn positions; and (iii) adaptive turn-level clipping: modulates each turn's clipping range based on its normalized IG, widening the update region for informative turns and narrowing it for uninformative ones.
title A$^2$TGPO: Agentic Turn-Group Policy Optimization with Adaptive Turn-level Clipping
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06200