ICML2026

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, Tang, Haihua Yang

53 citations

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 coarsegrained 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 Hi,t n k=1 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. Unlike methods using entropy as mere regularization, GTPO and GRPO-S establish a new state-of-the-art on AIME and MATH 500, outperforming prior entropy-guided baselines and validating our weighting mechanism.