Harnessing Uncertainty: Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

🤗 Upvotes: 34 | cs.LG, cs.CL

Authors:
Jiawei Wang, Jiacai Liu, Yuqian Fu, Yingru Li, Xintao Wang, Yuan Lin, Yu Yue, Lin Zhang, Yang Wang, Ke Wang

Title:
Harnessing Uncertainty: Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09265v1

Abstract:
In long-horizon tasks, recent agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant challenge that sparse, outcome-based rewards make it difficult to assign credit to intermediate steps. Previous methods mainly focus on creating dense reward signals to guide learning, either through traditional reinforcement learning techniques like inverse reinforcement learning or by using Process Reward Models for step-by-step feedback. In this paper, we identify a fundamental problem in the learning dynamics of LLMs: the magnitude of policy gradients is inherently coupled with the entropy, which leads to inefficient small updates for confident correct actions and potentially destabilizes large updates for uncertain ones. To resolve this, we propose Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients (EMPG), a framework that re-calibrates the learning signal based on step-wise uncertainty and the final task outcome. EMPG amplifies updates for confident correct actions, penalizes confident errors, and attenuates updates from uncertain steps to stabilize exploration. We further introduce a bonus term for future clarity that encourages agents to find more predictable solution paths. Through comprehensive experiments on three challenging agent tasks, WebShop, ALFWorld, and Deep Search, we demonstrate that EMPG achieves substantial performance gains and significantly outperforms strong policy gradient baselines. Project page is at https://empgseed-seed.github.io/