Divide and Conquer: Grounding LLMs as Efficient Decision-Making Agents via Offline Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19761v1
• Date: Mon, 26 May 2025 09:43:40 GMT
• Title: Divide and Conquer: Grounding LLMs as Efficient Decision-Making Agents via Offline Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon decision-making tasks due to deficient exploration and long-term credit assignment.<n>We propose an innovative framework that introduces a parameter-efficient and generally applicable hierarchy to LLM policies.<n>We develop a scheme where the low-level controller is supervised with abstract, step-by-step plans that are learned and instructed by the high-level policy.
• Score: 32.260964481673085
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: While showing sophisticated reasoning abilities, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with long-horizon decision-making tasks due to deficient exploration and long-term credit assignment, especially in sparse-reward scenarios. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer principle, we propose an innovative framework **GLIDER** (**G**rounding **L**anguage Models as Eff**I**cient **D**ecision-Making Agents via Offline Hi**E**rarchical **R**einforcement Learning) that introduces a parameter-efficient and generally applicable hierarchy to LLM policies. We develop a scheme where the low-level controller is supervised with abstract, step-by-step plans that are learned and instructed by the high-level policy. This design decomposes complicated problems into a series of coherent chain-of-thought reasoning sub-tasks, providing flexible temporal abstraction to significantly enhance exploration and learning for long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, GLIDER facilitates fast online adaptation to non-stationary environments owing to the strong transferability of its task-agnostic low-level skills. Experiments on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks show that GLIDER achieves consistent performance gains, along with enhanced generalization capabilities.

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