AT$^2$PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04767v1
• Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:35:49 GMT
• Title: AT$^2$PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search
• Authors: Zefang Zong, Dingwei Chen, Yang Li, Qi Yi, Bo Zhou, Chengming Li, Bo Qian, Peng Chen, Jie Jiang,
• Abstract summary: LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions.<n>We present AT$2$PO, a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization.
• Score: 19.443576967819684
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT$^2$PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT$^2$PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzfoutofspace/ATPO.

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