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Encouraging Good Processes Without the Need for Good Answers: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agent Planning

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arxiv 2508.19598 v1 pith:F4YQDNY3 submitted 2025-08-27 cs.LG

Encouraging Good Processes Without the Need for Good Answers: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agent Planning

classification cs.LG
keywords planningagentcapabilityoptimizationrltrtrainingactioncapabilities
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The functionality of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is primarily determined by two capabilities: action planning and answer summarization. The former, action planning, is the core capability that dictates an agent's performance. However, prevailing training paradigms employ end-to-end, multi-objective optimization that jointly trains both capabilities. This paradigm faces two critical challenges: imbalanced optimization objective allocation and scarcity of verifiable data, making it difficult to enhance the agent's planning capability. To address these challenges, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Tool-use Rewards (RLTR), a novel framework that decouples the training process to enable a focused, single-objective optimization of the planning module. Crucially, RLTR introduces a reward signal based on tool-use completeness to directly evaluate the quality of tool invocation sequences. This method offers a more direct and reliable training signal than assessing the final response content, thereby obviating the need for verifiable data. Our experiments demonstrate that RLTR achieves an 8%-12% improvement in planning performance compared to end-to-end baselines. Moreover, this enhanced planning capability, in turn, translates to a 5%-6% increase in the final response quality of the overall agent system.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  4. The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey

    cs.AI 2025-09 accept novelty 6.0

    Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.

  5. A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models

    cs.CL 2025-09 accept novelty 3.0

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