T²PO: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration Control for Stable Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:00:00 +0000

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 (T²PO), an uncertainty-aware framework that explicitly controls exploration at fine-grained levels. At the token level, T²PO monitors uncertainty dynamics and triggers a thinking intervention once the marginal uncertainty change falls below a threshold. At the turn level, T²PO identifies interactions with negligible exploration progress and dynamically resamples such turns to avoid wasted rollouts. We evaluate T²PO in diverse environments, including WebShop, ALFWorld, and Search QA, demonstrating substantial gains in training stability and performance improvements with better exploration efficiency.

^* Corresponding author.

Reinforcement Learning | Hejie Cui

T²PO: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration Control for Stable Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning