Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission2323 Authors

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards, Large Language Models, Reasoning, Token Entropy, Credit Assignment

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropy tokens drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. However, they overlook the fact that most of a reasoning trajectory consists of low-entropy segments that encode stable and reusable structural patterns. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that the overlap of low-entropy segments across correct responses strongly correlates with model accuracy, while overlaps involving incorrect responses exhibit stable but unproductive patterns. Motivated by these findings, we propose LESS, a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. LESS amplifies segments unique to correct responses, suppresses those unique to incorrect ones, and neutralizes segments shared by both, while preserving high-entropy exploration in the underlying RL algorithm. Instantiated on top of GRPO and GSPO, LESS not only improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks, but also achieves stronger robustness of the performance floor.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Language Models

Research Area Keywords: Language Modeling, Question Answering

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 2323