Trust the Critic More

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.39247v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard language model RL algorithms credit every token of a long rollout with the same advantage determined by the terminal reward. Actor-critic methods can provide finer-grained credit assignment, but learned critics are generally considered too inaccurate to trust when training LLMs with RL. In recent works, even when a critic is present, it is used only for baseline estimation, so every trajectory must be rolled out to its terminal reward. We introduce Actor-Critic with Action Chunking (AC2) that removes the need to roll every trajectory to completion. AC2 instead assigns credit to action chunks: short continuations of prefixes of past trajectories. A learned critic scores the state reached at the end of each action chunk, allo