TalentRL: Strategy-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Hierarchical Skill Routing

Abstract

Natural-language skills enable large language model (LLM) agents to reuse procedures across tasks, yet most systems retrieve individual skills from a flat SkillBank without explicitly modeling the high-level strategy that governs their selection and use. We introduce TalentRL, a strategy-guided reinforcement learning framework for hierarchical routing over procedural memory. Coarse-grained talents represent recurring strategies for skill use, while fine-grained skills provide executable procedures. For each task, the policy model selects a talent that guides execution and softly prioritizes its associated skills during similarity-based retrieval. However, since task outcomes depend jointly on talent selection, retrieved skill context, and downstream execution, terminal rewards alone cannot isolate the contribution of the routing decision. TalentRL therefore trains talent routing with reward contrasts between rollouts of the same task under matched interventions on the talent-conditioned context, and optimizes downstream execution with group-relative advantages. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, talent-aware supervised fine-tuning improves average success rate by 7.53%, 6.71%, and 9.21% over the corresponding zero-shot baselines for Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B, respectively. Reinforcement learning further improves these SFT checkpoints by 7.58% to 9.32%, and TalentRL achieves the highest average success rate among all compared methods on all three backbones. On the agentic benchmarks ALFWorld and WebShop, TalentRL achieves the highest ALFWorld success rate (99.3%) and the highest WebShop score (90.7) among all compared methods.