Segment Policy Optimization: Effective Segment-Level Credit Assignment
  in RL for Large Language Models
Authors: name: Yiran Guo; name: Lijie Xu; name: Jie Liu; name: Dan Ye; name: Shuang Qiu
Published: 2025-05-29 15:38:19

Abstract: Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models effectively
using reinforcement learning (RL) remains a crucial challenge. Existing
approaches primarily adopt two contrasting advantage estimation granularities:
Token-level methods (e.g., PPO) aim to provide the fine-grained advantage
signals but suffer from inaccurate estimation due to difficulties in training
an accurate critic model. On the other extreme, trajectory-level methods (e.g.,
GRPO) solely rely on a coarse-grained advantage signal from the final reward,
leading to imprecise credit assignment. To address these limitations, we
propose Segment Policy Optimization (SPO), a novel RL framework that leverages
segment-level advantage estimation at an intermediate granularity, achieving a
better balance by offering more precise credit assignment than trajectory-level
methods and requiring fewer estimation points than token-level methods,
enabling accurate advantage estimation based on Monte Carlo (MC) without a
critic model. SPO features three components with novel strategies: (1) flexible
segment partition; (2) accurate segment advantage estimation; and (3) policy
optimization using segment advantages, including a novel probability-mask
strategy. We further instantiate SPO for two specific scenarios: (1) SPO-chain
for short chain-of-thought (CoT), featuring novel cutpoint-based partition and
chain-based advantage estimation, achieving 6-12 percentage point
improvements in accuracy over PPO and GRPO on GSM8K. (2) SPO-tree for long CoT,
featuring novel tree-based advantage estimation, which significantly reduces
the cost of MC estimation, achieving 7-11 percentage point improvements
over GRPO on MATH500 under 2K and 4K context evaluation. We make our code
publicly available at https://github.com/AIFrameResearch/SPO.