arXiv AI By Xiuyi Lou, Zicheng Xu, Yu-Neng Chuang, Hoang Anh Duy Le, Zhaozhuo Xu, Guanchu Wang, Vladimir Braverman

Right Answer, Wrong Tokens: Tail-Aware Credit Calibration for RLVR

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The paper introduces Tail‑Aware Credit Calibration (TACO), a method that adjusts the positive credit given to tokens in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs) by evaluating each token’s rarity relative to the policy’s expectations. TACO reduces credit for high tail‑risk tokens while still allowing them to influence learning, thereby mitigating the positive‑credit contamination problem seen in GRPO‑style methods. Experiments on four LLMs across eight reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TACO consistently outperforms GRPO baselines and improves training stability for long‑horizon RL tasks.

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