Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents
Minzheng Wang, Run Luo, Yanbo Wang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of sciences, Zichen Liu Google, Yuqiao Tan, Tao Tan, Nan Xu, Lu Wang China Three Gorges Corporation 等 9 位作者
原文摘要
While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for closed-ended tasks, extending it to open-ended social language games via self-play reveals a critical issue: evolution impasse. Due to the vast strategy space, language agents frequently converge to homogenized behaviors, leading to deterministic match outcomes that eliminate the gradient signals necessary for policy evolution. To tackle this issue, we propose Dual-scale Evolutionary Policy Training (DEPT) for social language games. DEPT introduces a time-scaled evolutionary perception mechanism that detects impasse by quantifying dual-scale value baseline divergence alongside match entropy. Upon perceiving the collapse, it then activates asymmetric advantage reshaping to dynamically modulate the optimization landscape for intervention. Thus, our method effectively restores gradient signals and enforces sustained strategic exploration. Extensive experiments on multiple social language games demonstrate that DEPT outperforms strong baselines, avoiding policy degeneration and driving the continuous evolution of social language agents.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表