Outcome-Grounded Advantage Reshaping for Fine-Grained Credit Assignment in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo
| Challenge: | Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They introduce Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR) which redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OAR-G outperforms GRPO on a high-fidelity attribution signal and suppresses low-impact tokens while preserving the advantage mass. |
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