Empowering Multi-Turn Tool-Integrated Agentic Reasoning with Group Turn Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yifeng Ding, Hung Le, Songyang Han, Kangrui Ruan, Zhenghui Jin, Varun Kumar, Zijian Wang, Anoop Deoras
| Challenge: | Current reinforcement learning methods suffer from coarse-grained, trajectory-level rewards that provide insufficient learning signals for complex multi-turn interactions, leading to training stagnation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RL algorithm for training large language models for multi-turn tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) that incorporates three innovations: turn-level reward assignment that provides fine-grained feedback for individual turns, return-based advantage estimation where normalized discounted returns are calculated as advantages, and self-supervised reward shaping that exploits self-supervision signals from generated code to densify sparse binary outcome-based rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms GRPO by 3.0% across diverse math reasoning benchmarks and improves grepo by 3.9% on commonsense reasoning and program synthesis tasks. |
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