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HiPER: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Credit Assignment for Large Language Model Agents

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful feedback. Most existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches model LLM agents as flat policies operating at a single time scale, selecting one action at each turn. In sparse-reward settings, such flat policies must propagate credit across the entire trajectory without explicit temporal abstraction, which often leads to unstable optimization and inefficient credit assignment. We propose HiPER, a novel Hierarchical Plan-Execute RL framework that explicitly separates high-level planning from low-level execution. HiPER factorizes the policy into a high-level planner that proposes subgoals and a low-level executor that carries them out over multiple action steps. To align optimization with this structure, we introduce a key technique called hierarchical advantage estimation (HAE), which carefully assigns credit at both the planning and execution levels. By aggregating returns over the execution of each subgoal and coordinating updates across the two levels, HAE provides an unbiased gradient estimator and provably reduces variance compared to flat generalized advantage estimation. Empirically, HiPER achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging interactive benchmarks, reaching 97.4\% success on ALFWorld and 83.3\% on WebShop with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (+6.6\% and +8.3\% over the best prior method), with especially large gains on long-horizon tasks requiring multiple dependent subtasks. These results highlight the importance of explicit hierarchical decomposition for scalable RL training of multi-turn LLM agents.

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2026 6

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UNVERDICTED 6

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representative citing papers

ECHO: Prune to act, trace to learn with selective turn memory in agentic RL

cs.LG · 2026-06-30 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

ECHO is a selective turn-memory framework for agentic RL that compresses turns into indexed records, selects them for bounded contexts, and uses source indices to assign outcome credit to supporting evidence, reaching 43.4% accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus versus 28.9% for GRPO and 36.1% for SUPO.

GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning: Toward Digital Inhabitants

cs.AI · 2026-04-30 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

The paper delivers the first comprehensive overview of RL for GUI agents, organizing methods into offline, online, and hybrid strategies while analyzing trends in rewards, efficiency, and deliberation to outline a future roadmap.

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