Structuring MoE Expert Selection for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG, cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-05
Updated: 2026-10-05
Code: https://github.com/THUDM/slime
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: Long-horizon LLM agents are frequently implemented using sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, yet the co-design of agentic behavior and MoE structures remains underexplored.
Terminology
Abstract
Long-horizon LLM agents are frequently implemented using sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, yet the co-design of agentic behavior and MoE structures remains underexplored. In this work, we comprehensively study the connections between agentic post-training and MoE expert selection. In off-the-shelf MoE models, we observe expert selection exhibits a specialized structure that naturally aligns with agentic trajectories. Specifically, expert routing overlaps more between turns where the agent performs semantically similar operations (e.g., READ, UPDATE) than between turns with differing operations. However, standard RL algorithms ignore this specialization, allowing the MoE routing to go uncontrolled during training, which empirically limit task performance and inference efficiency. To address this, we introduce a hierarchical routing control framework for agentic tasks. We explicitly encourage turn-level expert selections to align with agentic operations while regularizing token-level expert selections to maintain local consistency. To resolve stability issues that arise during post-training with the proposed methods, we further introduce an entropy-gated control mechanism. Overall, our routing control framework achieves over 10-point improvements in success rate on all evaluated benchmarks. These results demonstrate that agentic trajectory structure provides an effective signal for optimizing MoE capacity during RL post-training.
Sources
- SMoES: Soft Modality-Guided Expert Specialization in MoE-VLMs
- Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agents
- MoE-GRPO: Optimizing Mixture-of-Experts via Reinforcement Learning in Vision-Language Models
- Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control
- Simulating Environments with Reasoning Models for Agent Training
- DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report
- DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models
- Uniform-Correct Policy Optimization: Breaking RLVR's Indifference to Diversity
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
- DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
- Temporally Extended Mixture-of-Experts Models
- AutomationBench
- Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism
- Expanding LLM Agent Boundaries with Strategy-Guided Exploration
- Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence
- The Myth of Expert Specialization in MoEs: Why Routing Reflects Geometry, Not Necessarily Domain Expertise
- Qwen3 Technical Report
- GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
- RLVMR: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Meta-Reasoning Rewards for Robust Long-Horizon Agents
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