When Credit Turns Against Tools: Transition-Aware Credit Assignment in Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Xiangyu Lu, Zhanke Zhou, Jiazhe Ning, Chentao Cao, Jiangchao Yao, Bo Han
原文摘要
Agentic reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards trains language models through multi-turn tool interactions, yet their reasoning performance and tool-calling ability can decline during training. We trace this degradation to three coupled mechanisms: (1) tool-token imbalance produces negative overall tool credit when incorrect trajectories contain more tool tokens per turn than correct ones; (2) aggregation amplification can further strengthen this negative signal as token-mean aggregation gives longer incorrect trajectories greater weight in policy updates; and (3) failure-driven retries prolong trajectories as models tend to call tools again after execution errors, extending potential negative credit to recovery attempts. To counter this suppression, we propose Transition-Aware Credit Assignment (TACA), which targets the transition from reasoning to tool use through supervision of both call initiation and generation. Specifically, TACA uses Advantage Projection to enforce a nonnegative mean advantage on tool-call tokens within each prompt group through a minimal uniform shift. Additionally, TACA guides tool-use decisions with Decision Contrast, comparing rewards for tool-assisted and direct answers to the same prompt. Through Supervised Replay, it reinforces tool-call generation using calls from previously sampled correct trajectories. Across models and tasks, TACA improves performance and sustains more reliable tool interaction during training, raising mean accuracy over MT-GRPO on six reasoning benchmarks by 4.61 percentage points for Qwen2.5-1.5B and 3.61 for Qwen2.5-3B. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/TACA.
cs.LG