arXiv:2607.27888cs.AI2026-07

发现推理中部分关键词对结果敏感但不可靠,提出新方法重分配奖励以提升长链推理能力。

Not All Tokens Deserve Equal Credit: Counterfactual Sensitivity Credit Reallocation for Long-CoT Reasoning

论文配图:Not All Tokens Deserve Equal Credit: Counterfactual Sensitivity Credit Reallocation for Long-CoT Reasoning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过反事实实验发现,多数词在正误假设下变化方向一致,敏感度不等于学习价值
  • 提出CSCR方法,降低高敏感词的奖励权重,保持总信用预算和正确方向
  • 在数学推理任务上优于基线GRPO,证明原方法奖励分配存在偏差

强化学习结合可验证奖励(RLVR)是提升大模型长链思维(long-CoT)推理的核心。现有无评判器方法如GRPO将响应级奖励均匀分配给所有标记,忽略其对最终结果的非均等贡献。在策略自蒸馏(OPSD)中,通过最小化前向KL散度实现密集分布监督,隐含假设生成概率变化反映答案对齐信息。我们通过固定轨迹并分别在正确与错误假设下重新评分测试该假设:多数标记在两种条件下朝相同方向变化,符号反转极少且优化信号高度重叠;大幅变动集中于易替换的表面形式标记,而承载具体推理内容的标记敏感度较低。这表明特权变化无法可靠指示答案对齐方向,其幅度主要反映反事实敏感性而非标记级学习价值。基于此,我们提出反事实敏感性信用重分配(CSCR),作为GRPO的简单扩展:减少高敏感标记的信用,重新归一化标记级优势,既保持原始信用预算,又保留验证器确定的方向。在长链数学推理基准上,CSCR在相同策略更新次数下持续优于GRPO基线。定向消融实验进一步证实:特权引导方向不可靠,适度降权最有效,过强调制会破坏优化稳定性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is central to improving long-CoT reasoning in large language models. Critic-free methods such as GRPO convert response-level rewards into advantages and uniformly broadcast them across tokens, overlooking their unequal contributions to the final outcome. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) instead provides dense distributional supervision by minimizing the forward KL divergence between an unprivileged policy and a privileged self-teacher, implicitly assuming that the resulting likelihood shifts encode reliable answer-aligned information. We test this premise by fixing each sampled trajectory and re-scoring it under two opposing outcome conditions, one asserting correctness and the other incorrectness. Most affected tokens shift in the same direction under both conditions, with few sign reversals and substantial overlap in the induced optimization signals. Large shifts also concentrate on highly substitutable surface-form tokens, whereas tokens carrying problem-specific reasoning content are less sensitive. These findings show that privileged shifts fail to provide reliable answer-aligned directions, while their magnitudes primarily reflect counterfactual sensitivity rather than token-level learning value. Based on these observations, we propose Counterfactual Sensitivity Credit Reallocation (CSCR), a simple extension of GRPO that reduces credit for highly sensitive tokens and renormalizes token-level advantages to preserve both the original credit budget and verifier-determined direction. On long-CoT mathematical reasoning benchmarks, CSCR consistently outperforms GRPO baseline with the same number of policy updates. Targeted ablations further corroborate our diagnosis: privilege-induced directions are unreliable, moderate downweighting is most effective, and stronger modulation destabilizes optimization.

长链推理奖励分配强化学习语言模型

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