English

Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents

Computation and Language 2026-05-12 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.08721,
  title  = {Breaking the Impasse: Dual-Scale Evolutionary Policy Training for Social Language Agents},
  author = {Minzheng Wang and Run Luo and Yanbo Wang and Zichen Liu and Yuqiao Tan and Tao Tan and Xu Nan and Yinhe Zheng and Wenji Mao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08721},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to the ACL 2026 Main Conference

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:59:34.166Z