Organizations: 1Tsinghua University · 2LLM Department, Tencent
Abstract
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.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for training LLM agents, yet popular methods such as GRPO/RLOO rely on multiple independently sampled complete trajectories for advantage estimation. In long-horizon agentic tasks, such a uniform rollout strategy can waste budget on uninformative dead-end attempts, while promising intermediate states do not receive sufficient exploration. The multi-turn structure of agentic trajectories, with interleaved actions and observations, naturally supports organizing a trajectory group as a tree, where each turn serves as a decision point for exploration. This perspective reframes effective exploration as the problem of deciding where to branch. We propose Process-Scorer Guided Adaptive Tree Rollout (PATR), a quality-aware rollout framework for multi-turn agent RL. PATR uses task-appropriate process feedback to score partial trajectories, selectively branches from promising states, reuses shared prefixes, and conservatively stops degenerate paths to reduce wasted sampling. The resulting rollout groups remain compatible with standard policy optimization while providing more efficient exploration under the same training budget. We evaluate PATR on FrozenLake and the challenging SWE-Bench, which is largely unexplored by prior tree-rollout agent RL methods. Experiments show that PATR improves performance by up to +5.0 points on SWE-Bench and +9.3 points on FrozenLake, highlighting process-guided tree rollouts as an effective strategy for scalable multi-turn RL.
Multi-turn agents solve complex tasks through extended sequences of tool interactions before producing a final answer, making credit assignment a fundamental challenge during post-training. Outcome rewards provide reliable supervision for short-horizon reasoning, but become sparse and high-variance as trajectories grow to tens or hundreds of tool calls. They can also be misleading: a failed rollout may contain many useful actions that move the agent closer to the goal, yet outcome-only training assigns them the same negative advantage as the eventual mistake. We propose TRACE (Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation), a dense credit-assignment method for agentic reinforcement learning. TRACE represents rollouts as state transitions at tool-call boundaries, obtains gold-answer log-probabilities from a frozen reference model, transforms them into log-ratio state values, and derives per-action rewards as Temporal-Difference changes in those values. This requires no additional critic or process-label training, and its one-step log-ratio TD component telescopes across redundant tool calls. On long-horizon complex search, TRACE substantially improves base-model tool-use ability using pure RL, without a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage, an agentic mid-training stage, or training on live-web data. On the closed-web BrowseComp-Plus benchmark, it raises Qwen3-4B from 7.2 to 35.6 and Qwen3-30B-A3B from 8.4 to 42.6. The learned search behavior also transfers to open-web benchmarks, and the learning curves show earlier improvement and faster convergence during RL training.
We formalize Rollout Informativeness under a Fixed Budget (RIFB) as the expected non-vanishing policy-gradient mass that a tool-use rollout set injects into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We prove that any budget-agnostic independent sampler suffers a collapse rate bounded away from zero for hard prompts regardless of the budget. Motivated by this, we recast intermediate state selection as a monotone submodular maximization problem, where a greedy one-step selector enjoys a 1 minus 1/e approximation guarantee. Our Uncertainty-aware Upper Confidence Bound (UUCB) terms arise as closed-form marginal gains of this objective. This turns the token-level entropy bonus from an empirical trick into an analytic consequence of the formulation. We present InfoTree, a training-time tree-search framework coupling UUCB with a learned Adaptive Budget Allocator (ABA) and an asynchronous Speculative Expansion scheme. ABA rescues prompts whose initial tree is wasted on uniform outcomes, lifting the mixed-outcome ratio from 58.1 percent to 76.3 percent with less than 5 percent budget overhead. Speculative Expansion reduces wall-clock overhead from 14.3 percent to 4.8 percent by tolerating bounded staleness in UUCB scores. Across nine benchmarks spanning math reasoning (AIME 2024 and 2025, MATH-500, OlympiadBench, USAMO), web-search agents (GAIA, HLE-100, BrowseComp-lite), and tool-rich coding and OS agents (APPS-verified, AgentBench-OS), InfoTree outperforms flat GRPO, DeepSearch, Tree-GRPO, AT2PO, CW-GRPO, and RC-GRPO. Head-to-head compositions with Tree-GRPO prefix sharing and CW-GRPO contribution weights deliver further gains, confirming that our selector operates orthogonally to rollout reuse and trajectory re-weighting. A 5 by 5 by 5 robustness grid reveals that over three quarters of the hyperparameter space lies on a performance plateau, confirming UUCB robustness.