Papers › Do Not Let Low-Probability Tokens Over-Dominate in RL for LLMs

Do Not Let Low-Probability Tokens Over-Dominate in RL for LLMs

19 May 2025arXiv:2505.12929archive 2025-07-28

Zhihe Yang, Xufang Luo, Zilong Wang, Dongqi Han, Zhiyuan He, Dongsheng Li, Yunjian Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with recent innovations such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) demonstrating exceptional effectiveness. In this study, we identify a critical yet underexplored issue in RL training: low-probability tokens disproportionately influence model updates due to their large gradient magnitudes. This dominance hinders the effective learning of high-probability tokens, whose gradients are essential for LLMs' performance but are substantially suppressed. To mitigate this interference, we propose two novel methods: Advantage Reweighting and Low-Probability Token Isolation (Lopti), both of which effectively attenuate gradients from low-probability tokens while emphasizing parameter updates driven by high-probability tokens. Our approaches promote balanced updates across tokens with varying probabilities, thereby enhancing the efficiency of RL training. Experimental results demonstrate that they substantially improve the performance of GRPO-trained LLMs, achieving up to a 46.2% improvement in K&K Logic Puzzle reasoning tasks. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/zhyang2226/AR-Lopti.

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