Act More, Decide Less: Skill-Guided Adaptive Action Chunking for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Abstract:Large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon interactive tasks typically follow a ReAct-style protocol, issuing one primitive action per LLM round. While this enables frequent replanning, it is inefficient for long-horizon tasks where many rounds are spent on routine action sequences. A natural alternative is to let the agent emit variable-length action chunks. However, naively training such policies with standard reinforcement learning fails: the agent either collapses to single-action behavior or over-commits to excessively long sequences. Both failures share a common root cause: the inability to learn chunk boundaries. We propose SPACE, which addresses this challenge by distilling chunk-boundary supervision from trajectory-induced programmatic skills. We induce two-level programmatic skills from successful trajectories, where subskill boundaries serve as direct chunk-boundary supervision. This temporal structure is then distilled into a primitive-chunk policy via hybrid on-/off-policy optimization with chunk-aware credit assignment. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that SPACE improves success rates by 7.0%-31.3% over the strongest baseline in each setting while reducing average LLM decision rounds by up to 78.9%.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.02042 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.02042v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.02042 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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