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This paper addresses the dual credit assignment problem in multi-turn LLM agents, where feedback is sparse across turns but granular within token generation. VETTA introduces a novel approach that jointly learns turn- and token-level values using separate heads on a shared, lightweight critic. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate significant improvements in success rates, showcasing the efficacy of coordinated credit assignment for enhanced agent performance and computational efficiency.
LLM agents achieve substantial performance gains by jointly learning credit at both the turn and token generation levels, overcoming limitations of existing single-level credit assignment methods.
Multi-turn LLM agents often receive sparse task feedback across several interactions, while generating each response token by token. This creates two related credit-assignment questions: which responses helped achieve the outcome, and which generation decisions mattered within each response? Existing methods typically focus on only one level: turn-level methods evaluate complete responses but do not distinguish the decisions within them; token-level methods can propagate feedback across turns but do not explicitly model credit for each response. These complementary limitations motivate learning credit at both levels and coordinating it in a single policy update. We introduce VETTA, a credit assignment method that jointly learns turn- and token-level values through separate heads on a shared lightweight critic. VETTA computes advantages along both temporal sequences and combines each turn advantage with a within-response-centered token residual for PPO updates. Furthermore, to reduce value-learning cost, the critic retains only early Transformer blocks from the pretrained checkpoint used to initialize the actor. On two challenging agent benchmarks, ALFWorld and WebShop, VETTA improves success rates over PPO by 37.5% and 22.3%, respectively, with Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct and achieves success rates of 95.5% and 76.0%, respectively, with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Critic-depth comparisons further show strong task performance with substantially lower critic-side computation. These results suggest that a compact shared critic can coordinate turn- and token-level credit to improve agent performance while keeping value estimation efficient. Code is available at https://github.com/Jiaju-Chen/VETTA-official.
