When Importance Sampling Misallocates Credit: Asymmetric Ratios for Outcome-Supervised RL
About
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise in large language models (LLMs) post-training, which typically rely on token-level clipping to maintain stability during optimization. Despite the empirical success of GRPO-style methods, we identify a fundamental and previously overlooked challenge in this popular Outcome-Supervised RL (OSRL) paradigm. We reveal that in OSRL, where advantages are shared across tokens within a response, importance sampling (IS) ratios deviate from their traditional purpose of distribution correction as in classic RL, which become token-level weights that allocate the shared advantage signal across tokens. We show that this hidden role shift induces a critical mismatch for positive-advantage tokens, leading to unbalanced token weighting between positive and negative tokens. Specifically, it suppresses the update of underrepresented tokens that are lagging behind, while over-amplifying already high-probability tokens. This mismatch results in rich-get-richer dynamics that over-reinforce confident tokens, weaken catch-up learning that drive entropy collapse, excessive repetition, and premature convergence. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Importance Sampling Policy Optimization (ASPO), a simple yet effective strategy that reverses the ratio-induced weighting of positive-advantage tokens, while stabilizing extreme updates and maintaining gradient flow. This mismatch correction aligns their update direction with the learning dynamics of negative ones. Comprehensive experiments across math reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASPO significantly mitigates entropy collapse, improves training stability, and enhances performance over strong GRPO-based baselines. Our analysis provides new insights into the role of token-level weighting in OSRL and highlights the critical importance of correcting ratio-induced weighting in LLM RL.