C$^2$GSPG: Confidence-calibrated Group Sequence Policy Gradient towards Self-aware Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Haotian, Wang, Shuo, Xu, Hongteng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Liu, Haotian
Wang, Shuo
Xu, Hongteng
author_facet Liu, Haotian
Wang, Shuo
Xu, Hongteng
contents Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants, play a central role in developing reasoning models. However, these methods often suffer from a critical overconfidence issue, which prevents them from achieving self-aware reasoning models. In this study, we propose a simple yet effective confidence-calibration group sequence policy gradient method, called C$^2$GSPG, which simultaneously enhances reasoning performance while suppressing overconfidence. In principle, we propose a Group Sequence Policy Gradient (GSPG) framework for learning reasoning models, which eliminates the token-level bias commonly appearing in GRPO and its variants. In this framework, we define the model confidence for each reasoning problem using the normalized sequence-level probability, and then apply a cross-entropy regularizer to calibrate the model confidence to the sequence's reward. We demonstrate that the confidence calibration regularizer and GSPG are collaborative for binary rewards, as their objectives always share the same gradient direction. For non-binary rewards, we apply nonlinear reward normalization and adaptive regularizer clipping, mitigating the potential conflict between the two objectives. Applying C$^2$GSPG to post-train large language models in logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, we show its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both reasoning accuracy and confidence calibration. The code of C$^2$GSPG is available at https://github.com/HaotianLiu123/CCGSPG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23129
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle C$^2$GSPG: Confidence-calibrated Group Sequence Policy Gradient towards Self-aware Reasoning
Liu, Haotian
Wang, Shuo
Xu, Hongteng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants, play a central role in developing reasoning models. However, these methods often suffer from a critical overconfidence issue, which prevents them from achieving self-aware reasoning models. In this study, we propose a simple yet effective confidence-calibration group sequence policy gradient method, called C$^2$GSPG, which simultaneously enhances reasoning performance while suppressing overconfidence. In principle, we propose a Group Sequence Policy Gradient (GSPG) framework for learning reasoning models, which eliminates the token-level bias commonly appearing in GRPO and its variants. In this framework, we define the model confidence for each reasoning problem using the normalized sequence-level probability, and then apply a cross-entropy regularizer to calibrate the model confidence to the sequence's reward. We demonstrate that the confidence calibration regularizer and GSPG are collaborative for binary rewards, as their objectives always share the same gradient direction. For non-binary rewards, we apply nonlinear reward normalization and adaptive regularizer clipping, mitigating the potential conflict between the two objectives. Applying C$^2$GSPG to post-train large language models in logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, we show its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both reasoning accuracy and confidence calibration. The code of C$^2$GSPG is available at https://github.com/HaotianLiu123/CCGSPG.
title C$^2$GSPG: Confidence-calibrated Group Sequence Policy Gradient towards Self-aware Reasoning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23129