Beyond Token-Level Policy Gradients for Complex Reasoning with Large Language Models

Abstract: Existing policy-gradient methods for auto-regressive LLMs typically select subsequent tokens one at a time as actions in the policy. While effective for many generation tasks, such an approach may not fully capture the structure of complex reasoning tasks, where a single semantic decision is often realized across multiple tokens--for example, when defining variables or composing equations. This introduces a potential mismatch between token-level optimization and the inherently block-level nature of reasoning in these settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-token Policy Gradient Optimization (MPO), a framework that treats sequences of K consecutive tokens as unified semantic actions. This block-level perspective enables our method to capture the compositional structure of reasoning trajectories and supports optimization over coherent, higher-level objectives. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and coding benchmarks show that MPO outperforms standard token-level policy gradient baselines, highlight the limitations of token-level policy gradients for complex reasoning, motivating future research to look beyond token-level granularity for reasoning-intensive language tasks.