InT: Self-Proposed Interventions Enable Credit Assignment in LLM Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper introduces Intervention Training (InT), a novel method enabling large language models to perform fine-grained credit assignment by proposing targeted corrections, significantly improving reasoning accuracy in mathematical problem-solving tasks.

Contribution

InT allows models to identify and correct specific reasoning errors through targeted interventions, enhancing the effectiveness of reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning.

Findings

Improves accuracy by nearly 14% on IMO-AnswerBench.

Outperforms larger models like gpt-oss-20b.

Facilitates better credit assignment in reasoning traces.

Abstract

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RL assigns credit only at the level of the final answer, penalizing entire reasoning traces when the outcome is incorrect and uniformly reinforcing all steps when it is correct. As a result, correct intermediate steps may be discouraged in failed traces, while spurious steps may be reinforced in successful ones. We refer to this failure mode as the problem of credit assignment. While a natural remedy is to train a process reward model, accurately optimizing such models to identify corrective reasoning steps remains challenging. We introduce Intervention Training (InT), a training paradigm in which the model performs fine-grained credit assignment on its own reasoning traces by proposing short, targeted corrections that steer trajectories toward higher reward. Using reference solutions commonly available in mathematical reasoning datasets and exploiting the fact that verifying a model-generated solution is easier than generating a correct one from scratch, the model identifies the first error in its reasoning and proposes a single-step intervention to redirect the trajectory toward the correct solution. We then apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to the on-policy rollout up to the point of error concatenated with the intervention, localizing error to the specific step that caused failure. We show that the resulting model serves as a far better initialization for RL training. After running InT and subsequent fine-tuning with RL, we improve accuracy by nearly 14% over a 4B-parameter base model on IMO-AnswerBench, outperforming larger open-source models such as gpt-oss-20b.