Hindsight Credit Assignment over Trees for Agentic RL
Penghong Zhao, Yihao Chen, Maoheng Yuan, Yunjian Zhang, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Haoran Xu, Man Lv, Yaolong Wang, Zhijie Sun, Guohua Liu, Yuewei Zhang
Abstract
Reinforcement learning for long-horizon LLM agents faces a fundamental dilemma: successful experiences are essential for policy improvement, yet limited policy capabilities make such experiences difficult to discover. Sparse outcome rewards compound this challenge, leaving sampled trajectories with little relative feedback for learning. In this paper, we propose TriGRPO, a tree-based reinforcement learning framework that turns scarce successes into exploration and learning signals through hindsight credit assignment within and across rollout trees. TriGRPO constructs rollout trees through hindsight-guided branching: when an ongoing trajectory reaches a matched decision state, a successful action discovered during rollout initiates a sibling branch that continues autonomously, enabling further exploration and parent-sibling comparisons. Three complementary groups organize policy optimization over these trees: root groups capture within-prompt relative returns, node groups assign credit from parent-sibling outcome differences, and cross groups supplement sparse feedback with historical performance on related tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent gains in task performance and rollout efficiency across model scales, highlighting structured hindsight credit assignment as an effective approach to long-horizon agent learning.