Reinforcement learning (RL) is central for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning, yet the leading critic-free algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), broadcasts a single sequence-level advantage uniformly across long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generations and constrains exploration with an unbounded Kullback-Leibler (KL) penalty, which dilutes token-level supervision and induces gradient instability and mode-seeking conservatism. We propose TIDE (Token-level Importance via Deviation and Entropy), a critic-free RL framework that reinterprets distribution deviation as a guiding signal rather than a rigid penalty. TIDE replaces the volatile reverse KL divergence with the bounded Hellinger distance, safely quantifying token-level exploration without risk of gradient explosion. To separate genuine reasoning breakthroughs from confident hallucinations, an entropy gating mechanism scales this deviation by the policy's predictive uncertainty, and the gated scores redistribute the sequence-level advantage across tokens. The resulting updates amplify exploratory steps while suppressing low-entropy deviations, without a value network and with negligible overhead. Across in-domain, held-out, and out-of-domain benchmarks, TIDE outperforms strong critic-free baselines: on the Qwen2.5-32B backbone it reaches 60.0% and 46.0% Avg@32 accuracy on AIME 2024 and AIME 2025, respectively, above competitive baselines such as DAPO. Token-level attribution, causal perturbation, and exploration analyses further support the interpretation that the entropy-gated deviation identifies pivotal reasoning steps rather than merely perturbing optimization dynamics.

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