English

T$^2$PO: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration Control for Stable Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-05 v1

Abstract

Recent progress in multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved reasoning LLMs' performances on complex interactive tasks. Despite advances in stabilization techniques such as fine-grained credit assignment and trajectory filtering, instability remains pervasive and often leads to training collapse. We argue that this instability stems from inefficient exploration in multi-turn settings, where policies continue to generate low-information actions that neither reduce uncertainty nor advance task progress. To address this issue, we propose Token- and Turn-level Policy Optimization (T2^2PO), an uncertainty-aware framework that explicitly controls exploration at fine-grained levels. At the token level, T2^2PO monitors uncertainty dynamics and triggers a thinking intervention once the marginal uncertainty change falls below a threshold. At the turn level, T2^2PO identifies interactions with negligible exploration progress and dynamically resamples such turns to avoid wasted rollouts. We evaluate T2^2PO in diverse environments, including WebShop, ALFWorld, and Search QA, demonstrating substantial gains in training stability and performance improvements with better exploration efficiency. Code is available at: https://github.com/WillDreamer/T2PO.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.02178,
  title  = {T$^2$PO: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration Control for Stable Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Haixin Wang and Hejie Cui and Chenwei Zhang and Xin Liu and Shuowei Jin and Shijie Geng and Xinyang Zhang and Nasser Zalmout and Zhenyu Shi and Yizhou Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02178},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables. Accepted to ICML 2026 as a Spotlight Paper

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:47:54.234Z