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

arXiv cs.AI / 5/5/2026

📰 NewsDeveloper Stack & InfrastructureModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that persistent instability in stable multi-turn RL training is largely caused by inefficient exploration, where agents repeatedly take low-information actions that neither reduce uncertainty nor advance the task.
  • It introduces T$^2$PO (Token- and Turn-level Policy Optimization), an uncertainty-aware framework that controls exploration at fine granularity.
  • At the token level, T$^2$PO tracks uncertainty changes and triggers a “thinking” intervention when the marginal reduction in uncertainty falls below a threshold.
  • At the turn level, it detects turns that make little exploration progress and dynamically resamples those turns to avoid wasting rollouts.
  • Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Search QA show improved training stability and performance, and the authors provide code via the linked GitHub repository.

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 (T^2PO), an uncertainty-aware framework that explicitly controls exploration at fine-grained levels. At the token level, T^2PO monitors uncertainty dynamics and triggers a thinking intervention once the marginal uncertainty change falls below a threshold. At the turn level, T^2PO identifies interactions with negligible exploration progress and dynamically resamples such turns to avoid wasted rollouts. We evaluate T^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.