Hindsight-Privileged RLVR: Single-Rollout Token Credit Without Group Sampling

arXiv:2610.20497 · cs.LG, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-10-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-10-14

Updated: 2026-10-15

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) trains language models from checked task outcomes, but assigning a terminal reward to individual reasoning tokens or actions remains difficult.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) trains language models from checked task outcomes, but assigning a terminal reward to individual reasoning tokens or actions remains difficult. Group-relative methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) sample several attempts per prompt, but lose their reward-based learning signal when all attempts receive the same outcome. We propose Hindsight-Privileged RLVR (HP-RLVR), a single-rollout method that turns a completed trajectory's own future into token-level update weights. The generating policy snapshot scores each eligible token under its causal history and under a hindsight context containing the realized future and verifier feedback. A normalized Jensen--Shannon divergence between the two views weights the reward relative to a historical baseline, yielding bounded token credit for both successful and failed attempts, with no reference solution or learned critic. In paired Qwen3-8B runs over a shared 100-step schedule, HP-RLVR trains 1.21 times, 1.46 times, and 2.30 times faster than GRPO on mathematics, code generation, and ALFWorld, using one eighth the rollouts per prompt. Accuracy is comparable overall, with HP-RLVR ahead on mathematics at all three sizes and GRPO ahead on code and ALFWorld. In ALFWorld, 43.2% (4B) and 49.0% (8B) of GRPO's gradient-norm records are zero, versus none for HP-RLVR.

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