Scaling LLM Multi-turn RL with End-to-end Summarization-based Context
  Management
Authors: name: Miao Lu; name: Weiwei Sun; name: Weihua Du; name: Zhan Ling; name: Xuesong Yao; name: Kang Liu; name: Jiecao Chen
Published: 2025-10-08 07:29:22

Abstract: We study reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model
(LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use, where context length quickly
becomes a fundamental bottleneck. Existing RL pipelines can suffer from
degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and most importantly,
strict context limits. To address these challenges, we introduce
summarization-based context management to training. In specific, it
periodically compresses the tool using history by LLM-generated summaries that
retain task-relevant information to keep a compact context while enabling the
agent to scale beyond the fixed context window. Building on this formulation,
we derive a policy gradient representation that seamlessly enables standard LLM
RL infrastructures to optimize both tool-use behaviors as well as summarization
strategies in an end-to-end fashion. We instantiate this framework with
SUmmarization augmented Policy Optimization
(SUPO), an LLM RL algorithm that enables long-horizon training beyond
a fixed context limit. Experiments on interactive function calling and
searching tasks demonstrate that SUPO significantly improves the
success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length
compared to baselines. We also demonstrate that for complex searching tasks,
SUPO can further improve the evaluation performance when scaling
test-time maximum round of summarization beyond that of training time. Our
results establish summarization-based context management as a principled and
scalable approach for training RL agents beyond a fixed context length limit.