Beyond Uniform Credit Assignment: Selective Eligibility Traces for RLVR

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05965v1
• Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 10:11:51 GMT
• Title: Beyond Uniform Credit Assignment: Selective Eligibility Traces for RLVR
• Abstract summary: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models.<n>We propose Selective Eligibility Traces (S-trace) as a sample-efficient, critic-free eligibility traces method.<n> Experiments demonstrate that S-trace not only outperforms GRPO, showing gains of 0.49% on Qwen3-1.7B and 3.16% on Qwen3-4B, and maintaining a robust 2.98% improvement when scaled further to Qwen3-8B.
• Score: 7.971447120817466
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, widely used critic-free algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) necessitate a ``uniform credit assignment'' assumption that indiscriminately broadcast trajectory-level advantages, hindering learning efficiency by failing to distinguish critical reasoning steps. To address this limitation, we propose Selective Eligibility Traces (S-trace). Grounded in the intuition of partial trust region preservation, we initially introduce P-trace as a sample-efficient, critic-free eligibility traces method, upon which we build S-trace, implementing a sparse eligibility traces mechanism to further mitigate variance and achieve fine-grained credit assignment by selectively masking low-entropy tokens. Theoretically, we contextualize the recent Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) method within the critic-free eligibility traces framework, identifying it as a special instance of the eligibility traces method operating under uniform credit assignment. Experiments demonstrate that S-trace not only outperforms GRPO, showing gains of 0.49\% on Qwen3-1.7B and 3.16\% on Qwen3-4B, and maintaining a robust 2.98\% improvement when scaled further to Qwen3-8B in average pass@16, but notably achieves this with simultaneously higher sample and token efficiency.

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