Deshu Chen
Author directory2026
TRACE-GRPO: Teacher-Refined Advantage Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agentic RL
Yuchen Liu | Tianchu Yao | Deshu Chen | Yinghao Zhang | Xigui Li | Zehui Ling | Xin Guo | Yuan Cheng | Chao Qu | Lintao Ma | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuchen Liu | Tianchu Yao | Deshu Chen | Yinghao Zhang | Xigui Li | Zehui Ling | Xin Guo | Yuan Cheng | Chao Qu | Lintao Ma | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used to post-train LLM agents, but its trajectory-level advantage is ill-suited to long-horizon credit assignment. Reward-homogeneous rollout groups yield zero advantage; otherwise, one scalar uniformly scales every token, obscuring which decisions determine the outcome. We propose **TRACE-GRPO** (**T**eacher-**R**efined **A**dvantage **C**redit **E**stimation for GRPO), which converts teacher-LLM feedback into hierarchical credit. Teacher scores provide a sample-level fallback for zero-variance groups, reweight trajectory advantage at the turn level, and redistribute turn credit at the token level using the policy’s log-probability shift under a teacher critique. This yields dense training-time credit without token-level annotations or learned critics. We also introduce **CAPA** (Critique-Aware Paged Attention), which reuses trajectory KV caches and reduces the isolated critique-conditioned forward from roughly 2× a vanilla GRPO step to approximately 5% of a training step. On ALFWorld and ScienceWorld with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TRACE-GRPO achieves 96.3% and 73.4% success, respectively, outperforming strong agent RL baselines. Ablations show cumulative gains from the three credit levels, and comparison with supervised fine-tuning on teacher-generated successes confirms that critique-guided policy optimization provides benefits beyond imitation. Code is available at [https://github.com/Lau-Jonathan/TRACE-GRPO](https://github.com/Lau-Jonathan/TRACE-GRPO).