aiqbench analysis
This research introduces Asymmetric Credit Policy Optimization (ACPO), a novel reinforcement learning method that refines token-level credit assignment by addressing the limitations of global entropy in large vocabulary models. By utilizing mode-local proxies and correcting for gradient saturation, ACPO improves reasoning capabilities on complex mathematical and coding benchmarks without relying solely on outcome signals. The approach represents a significant step forward in scaling verifiable reasoning tasks through more precise policy updates during training.
ACPO: Asymmetric Credit Policy Optimization via Mode-Local Entropy Surrogate
arXiv:2607.03126v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-supervised reinforcement learning scales to verifiable reasoning tasks, but trajectory-level rewards assign the same outcome signal to all sampled tokens, overlooking their unequal contributions to the reasoning process. Entropy provides a natural indicator of the model's decision state, yet using it for token-level credit assignment presents two key challenges: long-tail probabilities in large vocabularies corrupt both entropy values and gradients, and uncertainty carries distinct semantics across positive- and non-positive-advantage trajectories. We propose Asymmetric Credit Policy Optimization (ACPO), which replaces global entropy with the complement of the top-token probability as a mode-local proxy. Guided by gradient analysis, ACPO incorporates mismatch routing and saturation correction to shape policy updates into the desired asymmetric form, emphasizing uncertain decisions on positive trajectories while penalizing confident regions on failed ones. Theoretically, ACPO locally preserves the advantage direction while bounding surrogate error. Experiments on mathematical and coding reasoning benchmarks, including AIME 2025 and HumanEval Pro, show that ACPO consistently outperforms both entropy-aware methods (e.g., 80/20, GTPO) and strong outcome-supervised RL baselines (e.g., DAPO, SAPO).
Abstract:Outcome-supervised reinforcement learning scales to verifiable reasoning tasks, but trajectory-level rewards assign the same outcome signal to all sampled tokens, overlooking their unequal contributions to the reasoning process. Entropy provides a natural indicator of the model's decision state, yet using it for token-level credit assignment presents two key challenges: long-tail probabilities in large vocabularies corrupt both entropy values and gradients, and uncertainty carries distinct semantics across positive- and non-positive-advantage trajectories. We propose Asymmetric Credit Policy Optimization (ACPO), which replaces global entropy with the complement of the top-token probability as a mode-local proxy. Guided by gradient analysis, ACPO incorporates mismatch routing and saturation correction to shape policy updates into the desired asymmetric form, emphasizing uncertain decisions on positive trajectories while penalizing confident regions on failed ones. Theoretically, ACPO locally preserves the advantage direction while bounding surrogate error. Experiments on mathematical and coding reasoning benchmarks, including AIME 2025 and HumanEval Pro, show that ACPO consistently outperforms both entropy-aware methods (e.g., 80/20, GTPO) and strong outcome-supervised RL baselines (e.g., DAPO, SAPO).
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2607.03126 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2607.03126v3 [cs.LG] for this version)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 182 words
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