Evidence Hub

GTPO and GRPO-S: Token and Sequence-Level Reward Shaping with Policy Entropy

Hongze Tan, Zihan Wang, Jianfei Pan, Jinghao Lin, Hao Wang, Yifan Wu, Tao Chen, Zhihang Zheng et al.

arXiv, 2025

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet mainstream algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO remain constrained by a coarse-grained credit assignment paradigm, where all tokens within the same response receive the identical reward. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Entropy Weighting, systematically define entropy-based weight ratios $\frac{H_{i,t}}{\sum_{k=1}^{n} H_{k,t}}$ and similar variants to redistribute rewards and get fine-grained rewards through two new algorithms: Group Token Policy Optimization (GTPO), which assigns an entropy-weighted reward to each token and synthesizes token-specific advantage function to drive the model toward optimal path, and the analogous algorithm Sequence-Level GRPO (GRPO-S), which extends this design to the sequence level and exhibits superior stability in long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tasks.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free