CAPO: Critic-Guided Action-Aligned Policy Optimization for Advancing LLM Agent Capabilities

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for improving the agentic capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although critic-free methods such as GRPO are increasingly popular, we argue that critic-based methods remain well suited to long-horizon agentic tasks because their critic models can assess each state and assign credit to different decisions. However, representative critic-based methods such as PPO still organize value estimation, credit assignment, and policy updates at token granularity, whereas the environment state changes only after the agent completes a full action. In this work, we propose CAPO, a critic-guided action-aligned policy optimization method for advancing LLM agent capabilities. CAPO introduces two action-aligned designs. First, it estimates the state value at the action boundary using a critic model and assigns the corresponding advantage to the complete action rather than individual tokens. Second, CAPO introduces a novel action-aware policy ratio that aggregates token ratios within each action with length calibration for consistent updates across actions of different lengths. These two designs effectively achieve fine-grained credit assignment and consistent policy updates while remaining compatible with token-level gradient computation. Experiments across multi-hop QA, academic paper search, and text-world action tasks show that CAPO consistently outperforms representative RL methods. Further analyses validate both designs and reveal how action-aligned optimization improves multi-turn RL training. We hope this work provides a practical path for training more capable LLM agents.