GTPO and GRPO-S: Token and Sequence-Level Reward Shaping with Policy Entropy
Hongze Tan, Zihan Wang, Jianfei Pan, Jinghao Lin, Hao Wang, Yifan Wu, Tao Chen, Zhihang Zheng
Abstract
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet mainstream algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO remain constrained by a coarse-grained credit assignment paradigm, where all tokens within the same response receive the identical reward. In this paper, we propose **Dynamic Entropy Weighting**, systematically define entropy-based weight ratios $\frac{H_{i,t}}{\sum_{k=1}^{n} H_{k,t}}$ and similar variants to redistribute rewards and get fine-grained rewards through two new algorithms: **Group Token Policy Optimization (GTPO)**, which assigns an entropy-weighted reward to each token and synthesizes token-specific advantage function to drive the model toward optimal path, and the analogous algorithm **Sequence-Level GRPO (GRPO-S)**, which admits a completely similar design at the sequence level. Unlike methods using entropy as mere regularization, GTPO and GRPO-S establish a new state-of-the-art on AIME and MATH 500, outperforming prior entropy-guided baselines and validating our weighting mechanism.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
tan2026gtpo,
title={{GTPO} and {GRPO}-S: Token and Sequence-Level Reward Shaping with Policy Entropy},
author={Hongze Tan and Zihan Wang and Jianfei Pan and Jinghao Lin and Hao Wang and Yifan Wu and Tao Chen and Zhihang Zheng and Zhihao Tang and Haihua Yang},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=G5x5eEZ8yY}
}