# S3AC: Stabilized, Selective, and Scalable Actor-Critic for LLM Reasoning > Source: > Published: 2026-10-27 06:00:23+00:00 Critic-free methods are widely used in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, avoiding difficult and costly critic training. Common alternatives lack token-level credit assignment and typically rely on grouped rollouts to estimate prompt-spec