# Apple — DACA-GRPO: Denoising-Aware Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Models

- Company: Apple (apple.com)
- Announced: 2026-09-16
- Category: research-paper
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/denoising-aware-credit-assignment
- Record: https://forck.live/items/11447-daca-grpo-denoising-aware-credit-assignment-for-reinforcement-learning-in
- Subject: Machine Learning Research

Apple researchers propose DACA-GRPO, a plug-and-play enhancement for GRPO-style trainers that introduces Denoising Progress Scores and Stratified Masking Likelihood to improve credit assignment in reinforcement learning for diffusion language models. The method achieves consistent gains across seven benchmarks, including up to 5.6pp on math reasoning, 7.4pp on code generation, 36.3pp on constraint satisfaction, and 5.9pp on JSON schema adherence.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/denoising-aware-credit-assignment:

> We propose Denoising-Aware Credit Assignment for GRPO (DACA-GRPO), a lightweight, plug-and-play enhancement for any GRPO-style trainer. DACA-GRPO introduces two complementary mechanisms: Denoising Progress Scores, which extract per-token importance weights from intermediate predictions at no additional forward cost, and Stratified Masking Likelihood, which partitions token positions into strata so that each token is predicted with most of the sequence as context, reducing the mean-field bias. Applied on top of three GRPO base methods, DACA-GRPO achieves consistent improvements across seven benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, constraint satisfaction, and constrained generation, with gains of up to 5.6pp on math reasoning, 7.4pp on code generation, 36.3pp on constraint satisfaction, and 5.9pp on JSON schema adherence.

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Record: https://forck.live/items/11447-daca-grpo-denoising-aware-credit-assignment-for-reinforcement-learning-in
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