mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Blockwise Advantage Estimation for Multi-Objective RL with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv 2602.10231 ↗First posted 10 Feb 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 4

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) assigns a single scalar advantage to all tokens in a completion. For structured generations with explicit segments and objectives, this couples unrelated reward signals across segments, leading to objective interference and misattributed credit. We propose Blockwise Advantage Estimation, a family of GRPO-compatible methods that assigns each objective its own advantage and applies it only to the tokens in the corresponding text block, reducing reliance on hand-designed scalar rewards and scaling naturally to additional objectives. A key challenge is estimating advantages for later blocks whose rewards are conditioned on sampled prefixes; standard unbiased approaches require expensive nested rollouts from intermediate states. Concretely, we introduce an Outcome-Conditioned Baseline that approximates intermediate state values using only within-group statistics by stratifying samples according to a prefix-derived intermediate outcome. On math tasks with uncertainty estimation, our method mitigates reward interference, is competitive with a state-of-the-art reward-designed approach, and preserves test-time gains from confidence-weighted ensembling. More broadly, it provides a modular recipe for optimizing sequential objectives in structured generations without additional rollouts.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 12 of its 16 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

Builds on

12 of 16 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025From Solving to Verifying: A Unified Objective for Robust Reasoning in LLMs19 Nov
  2. 2025Don't Waste Mistakes: Leveraging Negative RL-Groups via Confidence Reweighting9 Oct
  3. 2025Stratified GRPO: Handling Structural Heterogeneity in Reinforcement Learning of LLM Search Agents7 Oct
  4. 2025Conditional Advantage Estimation for Reinforcement Learning in Large Reasoning Models28 Sep
  5. 2025Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty22 Jul
  6. 2025Segment Policy Optimization: Effective Segment-Level Credit Assignment in RL for Large Language Models29 May
  7. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective26 Mar
  8. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale18 Mar

Other references · 4

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  2. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  3. 2024VinePPO: Refining Credit Assignment in RL Training of LLMscited by 168
  4. 2025The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMscited by 91

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation
  2. 2026TreeAdv: Tree-Structured Advantage Redistribution for Group-Based RL
  3. 2026Dual-Channel Robust Group-Relative Policy Optimization via Advantage and Sequence-Weight Estimation
  4. 2026GDEPO: Group Dual-dynamic and Equal-right Advantage Policy Optimization with Enhanced Training Data Utilization for Sample-Constrained Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026STAR-GRPO: Canonical Anchoring and Reliability-First Advantages against Representation-Dependent Reward Hacking
  6. 2026On Advantage Estimates for Max@K Policy Gradients
  7. 2025Tree-OPO: Off-policy Monte Carlo Tree-Guided Advantage Optimization for Multistep Reasoning
  8. 2026On the Policy Gradient Foundations of Group Relative Policy Optimization: Credit Assignment, Gradient Sparsity, and Rank Collapse