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Entropy Pacing Policy Optimization for Multi-Task Agentic Reinforcement Learning

About

Recent breakthroughs of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential for complex agentic Large Language Model (LLM) tasks. However, existing efforts largely focus on single-task settings, whereas real-world deployment necessitates a generalist agent capable of solving multiple tasks simultaneously. In this work, we identify a critical yet underexplored phenomenon in multi-task agentic RL: different tasks can exhibit exploration-exploitation pace mismatch. Specifically, easier tasks may converge early to low-entropy policies that hinder learning on harder tasks, while harder tasks can, in turn, push easier tasks back toward high-entropy exploration. This back-and-forth interaction creates inter-task entropy crossovers and frequent entropy spikes. Inspired by this observation, we introduce Entropy Pacing Policy Optimization (EPPO) for multi-task agentic LLMs, which coordinates entropy across tasks to stabilize multi-task optimization. At the core of EPPO is a task-wise dynamic clipping mechanism that replaces the fixed clipping threshold in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a task entropy-aware adaptive bound, tightening updates for over-confident tasks while relaxing them for under-explored ones. Experiments on the multi-task agentic benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed EPPO yields results superior to its counterparts.

Zetian Hu, Shunyu Liu, Junjie Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Ting-En Lin, Yongbin Li, Dacheng Tao• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Web Shopping AgentWebshop
Success Rate (SR)57.5
72
Embodied Agent Instruction FollowingALFWorld (ALF) (test)
Success Rate91
19
Database Querying Agent TaskDB
Success Rate60.5
19
Operating System Interaction Agent TaskOS
Success Rate32.8
19
Knowledge Graph Interaction Agent TaskKG
Success Rate29.6
19
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