Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Long-horizon LLM agents interact with their environments through complete assistant turns while generating each action token by token. We observe that critic values vary primarily across turns, motivating optimization anchored at turns with finer credit allocation among tokens. We propose Multiscale Policy Optimization (MPO), combining Multiscale Advantage Estimation (MAE) and turn-level importance sampling to align credit assignment and policy updates at the turn scale. Extensive experiments across search, tool-use, and automation tasks with 4B and 30B-A3B models demonstrate consistent gains over strong RL baselines.
Authors
- Tingyang Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5635-9326)
- Bryan Dai
- Huatong Song
- Ziyang Zeng
- Chuan Hao
- Ran Tao
- Feng Chang
- Hui Yang
- Tao Ren
- Yifan Luo
- Jia Deng
- Yining Li
- Jiafeng Liang
- Jinyang Jiang
- Shuo Tang
- Kunbao Ding
- Qiyao Wang
- Guanghao Li
- Yuhua Jiang
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.35013
- Primary Topic
- Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
- Type
- preprint