SHAPE: Stage-aware Hierarchical Advantage via Potential Estimation for LLM Reasoning
Zhengyang Ai Huawei Technologies Ltd., Zikang Shan Peking University, Xiaodong Ai Huawei Technologies Ltd., Jingxian Tang, Hangkai Hu Huawei Technologies Ltd., Pinyan Lu Huawei Technologies Ltd. and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
原文摘要
Process supervision has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet existing methods fail to distinguish meaningful progress from mere verbosity, leading to limited reasoning capabilities and unresolved token inefficiency. To address this, we propose Stage-aware Hierarchical Advantage via Potential Estimation (SHAPE), a framework that formalizes reasoning as a trajectory through a state space of empirical solvability. SHAPE introduces a hierarchical credit assignment mechanism: at the segment level, it employs a stage-aware advantage function to prioritize efficient breakthroughs in low-potential states; at the token level, it utilizes entropy-driven redistribution to sharpen execution signals. Extensive experiments in math reasoning across three base models and five benchmarks demonstrate that SHAPE achieves an average accuracy gain of 3% with 30% reduced token consumption.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表