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arXiv · 2606.22164

Drowning in Routine: Signal Dilution in Multi-Turn Agent Training

Yann Pernot·Vi Retault
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Abstract

Multi-turn agents interleave consequential decisions with routine execution: some actions change the downstream return distribution, while others are necessary but reward-equivalent. The cost of trajectory-level credit assignment, often attributed to long horizons, is in fact governed by decision density $ρ$: the fraction of turns whose actions affect the return. When decision density is low, routine turns create signal dilution: they add gradient variance to trajectory-level estimators such as GRPO without adding expected signal. Under explicit assumptions, the resulting turn-level to trajectory-level signal-to-noise ratio scales as $ρ^{-1/2}$, provided critic error remains controlled. The same analysis identifies the complementary regime: at high decision density, trajectory-level methods can remain competitive while avoiding the cost of a critic. In a controlled environment where $ρ$ is exactly tunable, the predicted scaling is recovered with $R^2 = 0.999$, and the training-step gap widens significantly as $ρ\to 0$.

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Yann Pernot, Vi Retault. 2026-06-20. Drowning in Routine: Signal Dilution in Multi-Turn Agent Training. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22164

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