AlphaToken: Decoupling Adaptation and Stability for Path-Aware Response Token Valuation in LLM Post-Training
Token selection is pivotal for effective LLM post-training. However, existing methods mostly rely on local heuristics and rarely formulate token selection as a principled valuation of individual response tokens. We introduce $\textbf{AlphaToken}$, a response token valuation framework that decouples valuation into $\textbf{adaptation}$ (promoting target-task learning) and $\textbf{stability}$ (preserving pre-trained capabilities), and makes each objective $\textbf{path-aware}$ by combining the direct-path signal from local token gradients with the downstream causal-path signal in autoregressive generation. Since retention data are typically unavailable, AlphaToken approximates stability vi...
| Authors | Liu Qing, Ou Wu, Yi Du |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 June 2026 |
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