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 AT²PO (**A**gentic **T**urn-based **P**olicy **O**ptimization via **T**ree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT²PO 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.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.1106
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 24120–24143
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1106/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Zefang Zong, Dingwei Chen, Yang Li, Qi Yi, Bo Zhou, Chengming Li, BO Qian, Peng Chen, and Jie Jiang. 2026. AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24120–24143, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search (Zong et al., ACL 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1106.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.acl-long.1106.checklist.pdf























