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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Correctable Fork Tokens: Verifier-Anchored Selective Credit Assignment for Tool-Integrated RLVR

Shuqi Yin

Abstract

In tool-integrated reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), sequence-level verifier signals are issued for trajectories whose outcomes are determined by a sparse subset of tokens—tool names, argument keys, and argument values. Standard RLVR assigns the same advantage to every token in a rollout, diluting credit at precisely the positions that matter. We propose **Correctable Fork Tokens (CFT)**, which decomposes selective credit assignment into two subproblems: *where* to update, and *how much* to update at those positions. To this end, CFT introduces a training-only answer-conditioned branch sharing parameters with the student policy. The key insight is that conditioning on the ground-truth answer concentrates the model's distribution at decision-fork positions, providing hindsight localization without additional parameter capacity or imitation targets. Critically, this benefit requires accurate answer information: a larger-capacity teacher without the answer fails to replicate these gains, confirming that privileged answer information—not teacher capacity—is the active ingredient. CFT uses this entropy reduction () to identify correctable fork positions, then rescales token-level credit at those positions while preserving the verifier advantage as the sole signal for update direction. On BFCL v3/v4, CFT improves multi-turn accuracy by **4.2/6.5** pp and overall accuracy by **3.1/2.2** pp over GRPO; it further surpasses On-policy distillation—which employs a larger Expert Model as teacher—by **3.6/6.7** pp on multi-turn, confirming that answer-conditioned fork localization rather than teacher capacity drives the improvement. On Tau3, the average score improves by **8.3** pp. We additionally present a three-level structured verifier for tool-call settings; ablations confirm that finer-grained verifier feedback and selective token credit are complementary. Our reproducible implementation is available at [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CFT](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CFT).

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