TCPO: Turn-Level Credit Policy Optimization
This work addresses the credit assignment problem in multi-turn reasoning, where episode-level verifier scores inadequately reflect individual action contributions to final outcomes. To resolve this, the authors propose TCPO, a method that transforms coarse episode-level rewards into fine-grained credit signals through a reference-state comparison mechanism, augmented with retrospective credit, hindsight-delayed credit, and selective counterfactual estimation. By integrating episode-level advantage construction with guidance from multiple verifier types, TCPO enables precise action-value evaluation. Empirical results demonstrate substantial improvements over existing baselines across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and AppWorld tasks, reducing the number of turns required for success and achieving state-of-the-art or tied-best Pass@8 performance on Qwen3-4B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B.