{"slug": "think-harder-not-larger", "title": "Think harder not larger?", "summary": "A paper proposes STEP-HRL, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that conditions LLM agents on single-step transitions instead of full interaction histories, using completed subtasks to represent global progress and a local progress module to summarize history within each subtask. Experiments on the ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks show STEP-HRL substantially outperforms baselines in performance and generalization while reducing token usage.", "body_md": "“Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex interactive decision-making tasks. However, existing LLM agents typically rely on increasingly long interaction histories, resulting in high computational cost and limited scalability. In this paper, we propose STEP-HRL, a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework that enables step-level learning by conditioning only on single-step transitions rather than full interaction histories. STEP-HRL structures tasks hierarchically, using completed subtasks to represent global progress of overall task. By introducing a local progress module, it also iteratively and selectively summarizes interaction history within each subtask to produce a compact summary of local progress. Together, these components yield augmented step-level transitions for both high-level and low-level policies. Experimental results on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks consistently demonstrate that STEP-HRL substantially outperforms baselines in terms of performance and generalization while reducing token usage.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/think-harder-not-larger", "canonical_source": "https://forum.level1techs.com/t/think-harder-not-larger/257453#post_3", "published_at": "2026-09-30 17:21:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-30 17:49:11.391209+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "large-language-models", "ai-agents", "ai-research"], "entities": ["STEP-HRL", "ScienceWorld", "ALFWorld"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/think-harder-not-larger", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/think-harder-not-larger.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/think-harder-not-larger.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/think-harder-not-larger.jsonld"}}