Beyond Policy Optimization: A Data Curation Flywheel for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Planning

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7693 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, Agentic Planning, Long-Horizon Planning

Abstract: Large Language Reasoning Models have demonstrated remarkable success on static tasks, yet their application to multi-round agentic planning in interactive environments faces two fundamental challenges. First, the intractable credit assignment problem renders conventional reinforcement learning ineffective in sparse-reward settings. Second, the computational overhead of verbose, step-by-step reasoning histories is prohibitive. To address these challenges, we propose BPO, a three-stage framework (bootstrapping, extrapolation, and refinement) that establishes a self-improving data flywheel to develop robust reasoning models for long-horizon, sparse-reward environments. Our framework first bootstraps efficient reasoning using the proposed planning quaternions with long-short chain-of-thought fusion. It then extrapolates to out-of-distribution tasks through complexity-stratified curriculum learning. Finally, the model iteratively refines itself by learning exclusively on experiences selected via reward-gated rejection sampling. Experiments on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art with significant token efficiency, providing a new recipe for reasoning models in agentic planning.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: AI/LLM Agents

Research Area Keywords: Language Modeling, AI / LLM Agents

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 7693