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Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) · 2608.18682 · 2026/08/19

RTPO: Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization for Stabilizing Agentic RL Training

Li, Yugu, Cao, Jimmy, Qiao, Jianglin, Hu, Siyi
TL;DR:RTPO:把多轮 rollout 组织成稀疏反向树、按时间逆序做 turn 级策略更新——理论上消除上下文错配与异步漂移,多轮 agentic RL 训练更稳。

🎯 问题

多轮 agentic RL 高度不稳定,轮数增加时性能严重退化;三个耦合的失稳源:rollout-训练上下文错配、稀疏终局奖励下弱 turn 级信用分配、短长轨迹在不同策略版本下训练的异步策略漂移。

🔬 方法

统一 reverse-turn 表述:多轮 rollout 组织为稀疏反向树,turn 级策略更新按时间逆序,让每个决策对齐其下游续段;理论保证消除上下文错配与异步漂移、降低信用偏差、收敛到递归最优。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
1 Introduction
2 Theoretical Analysis: Training Instability
3 Method: Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization (RTPO)
4 Experimental Results and Analysis
5 Concluding Remarks

📊 结果

多轮 agentic RL 基准上训练稳定性与性能提升。

💡 与研究方向关联

多轮交互中的训练稳定性直接是 duplex agent(连续多轮全双工)训练的根基问题。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Training multi-turn agentic workflows with reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models to perform complex reasoning, use external tools, and conduct iterative search beyond single-turn settings. Yet multi-turn RL training remains highly unstable, often causing severe performance degradation as the number of turns increases. Through theoretical analysis, we identify three tightly coupled sources of instability: rollout-training context mismatch, weak turn-level credit assignment under sparse terminal rewards, and asynchronous policy drift when short and long trajectories are optimized under different policy versions. We show that these issues share a common structural origin in flattened trajectory optimization and address them through a unified reverse-turn formulation. We propose Reverse-Turn Policy Optimization (RTPO), which organizes multi-turn rollouts as sparse reverse trees and performs turn-level policy updates in temporal reverse order, aligning each decision with its downstream continuation. RTPO enables causally consistent turn-level credit assignment and on-policy continuation to control asynchronous drift. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that RTPO eliminates context mismatch and asynchronous drift under the proposed turn-level formulation, reduces credit bias, and converges to recursive optimality. Experiments on multi-turn agentic RL benchmarks show that RTPO improves upon trajectory- and turn-level baselines by 21.50% and 10.76%, respectively, highlighting its potential to support more stable training for tool-using agents.
Deep Read · 2026-08-21高松灯 / Agent 日报
Multi-Turn RLCredit AssignmentAgentic RLStability