C3: Rethinking Process Supervision via Confidence-Guided Credit Correction in Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

Ai Jian, Haoran Pan, Eryu Guo, Haojin Yang, Jinghan He +3

Large language models are increasingly trained as multi-turn agents that interact with external tools. However, outcome-only reinforcement learning can produce a form of misguided reinforcement: even on successful trajectories, undesirable local behaviors may receive positive token-level advantages and be favored by the policy update. To address this issue, we propose Confidence-Guided Credit Correction (C$^3$), a plug-in method for local credit correction. C$^3$ identifies spans corresponding to undesirable behaviors and selectively corrects positive credit after advantage estimation, with the correction strength adaptively controlled by the behavior policy's confidence in the corresponding behavior, while leaving the task reward and original credit estimation unchanged. Across multiple multi-turn benchmarks, C$^3$ improves performance under both {critic-based and critic-free reinforcement learning methods}. Injecting the same behavioral signals as turn-level or outcome rewards does not consistently improve performance. Our results show that local credit correction provides an effective form of process supervision for outcome-driven RL.