arXiv Machine Learning By Max Henning H\"oth, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu

AtManRL: Towards Faithful Reasoning via Differentiable Attention Saliency

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

AtManRL introduces differentiable attention manipulation to train salient chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models. By optimizing an additive attention mask that identifies the tokens necessary to recover the model’s answer, the method derives a saliency reward combined with an outcome reward in a GRPO framework with decoupled advantages. Across three models and four benchmarks, AtManRL improves saliency and faithfulness metrics while maintaining comparable accuracy to length‑penalty baselines.

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