Stabilizing Off-Policy Training for Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Turn-Level Importance Sampling and Clipping-Triggered Normalization

Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as PPO and GRPO are widely used to train large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn agentic tasks. However, in off-policy training pipelines, these methods can exhibit unstable optimization dynamics and are prone to perfor- mance collapse. Through empirical analysis, we identify two fundamental sources of instability in this setting: (1) a granularity mismatch between token-level policy optimization and turn- structured interactions, and (2) high-variance and unreliable gradient updates induced by off- policy importance sampling and inaccurate advantage estimation. To address these challenges, we propose SORL, Stabilizing Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Agent Train- ing. SORL introduces mechanisms that align policy optimization with the structure of multi- turn interactions and adaptively suppress unreliable off-policy updates, yielding more conserva- tive and robust learning dynamics. Within this framework, we instantiate two stabilized algo- rithms: SO-PPO and SO-GRPO. Both algorithms are designed to mitigate gradient variance and prevent optimization collapse without requiring careful early stopping or heuristic tuning. We evaluate SO-PPO and SO-GRPO on benchmarks spanning open-domain QA, multi-hop QA, and medical multiple-choice QA, and further assess their transfer to asynchronous RL for mathe- matical reasoning by training on DAPO-Math-17k and validating on AIME-2024. These results demonstrate that SORL provides a practical, scalable, and general framework for stabilizing re- inforcement learning in multi-turn LLM agent training and asynchronous RL for mathematical reasoning.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2511.20718 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2511.20718v3 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.20718 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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