Margin-Guided Token Credit for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

In reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, a language model is rewarded for a correct final answer, and GRPO passes that reward to every token of the solution in equal measure. We instead place the credit where the model hesitated, in a method we call MCPO (Margin-Credit Policy Optimization). We measure hesitation by the top-2 margin $M=p_1-p_2$ of the policy's next-token distribution, map it to a score with two fixed thresholds, and spread each solution's advantage over its tokens so that the mean stays unchanged. The margin is read from a forward pass the trainer already performs, so the method needs no extra model evaluation and no batch statistics. We train MiniCPM5-2B-Base with LoRA for 200 steps on 2,048 DAPO-Math problems and evaluate on six competition-math benchmarks. MCPO beats an unmodified GRPO baseline for all five data seeds, by 6.55 points of macro avg@32 on avera…