When Does Action Credit Need Updating?

Hongye Yang, Boxiao Huang

Tool-using agents are continually updated with new interaction data. After each policy update, however, previously estimated action credits may become stale. Recomputing them from scratch can require many additional tool calls and environment interactions, making repeated updates increasingly expensive. We ask a simple question: when does historical action credit actually need to be updated? Our key observation is that a change in action value does not necessarily imply a change in the decision. Historical credit can still be useful as long as policy-induced drift is too small to overturn the existing action ranking. Building on this idea, we introduce pairwise branch sensitivity to capture how strongly a policy update affects the downstream regions that distinguish two candidate actions. We then derive a first-order anchored credit-transport estimator that updates historical credit using old interventional trajectories, and propose a Decision-Sufficient Credit Gate (DSC-Gate) that chooses whether to reuse, transport, or resample credit. Experiments show that branch sensitivity explains credit drift substantially better than global policy distance. With sufficient historical…