Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training

Abstract

Training long-horizon language model agents requires assigning credit to intermediate decisions from sparse terminal feedback. Within a finite group of sibling rollouts, useful action comparisons depend on their context, evidence for both alternatives, and how that evidence enters learning. We propose Matched-Context Group Policy Optimization (MCGPO), a procedure for constructing weighted action preferences from already collected trajectories. MCGPO defines comparison contexts with pre-action state summaries and observed rubric progress, annotated by task rules. Two-action support selects among ordered exact and coarse matching rules. Fixed folds separate candidate decisions from the terminal outcomes used to orient their preferences, and support-dependent evidence weights scale an auxiliary pairwise objective alongside shared GraphGPO task learning. MCGPO reuses rollout data and each response's original history, preserving critic-free training. Across six environment-backbone settings with three training seeds each, MCGPO improves mean success over matched GraphGPO: by 0.47-1.46 percentage points on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B and 7B, and by 3.96 and 5.16 points on WebShop with Qwen3-4B and 8B. The ALFWorld gains build on baseline success above 92%, where remaining headroom is limited. Integrated success improves in three of four Qwen2.5 settings. Three-seed factorial controls support opposite-fold evidence and evidence weighting; joint state-rubric matching achieves the highest mean in all four representation-control settings.