Revisiting Group Relative Policy Optimization: Insights into On-Policy and Off-Policy Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mroueh, Youssef, Dupuis, Nicolas, Belgodere, Brian, Nitsure, Apoorva, Rigotti, Mattia, Greenewald, Kristjan, Navratil, Jiri, Ross, Jerret, Rios, Jesus
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Mroueh, Youssef
Dupuis, Nicolas
Belgodere, Brian
Nitsure, Apoorva
Rigotti, Mattia
Greenewald, Kristjan
Navratil, Jiri
Ross, Jerret
Rios, Jesus
author_facet Mroueh, Youssef
Dupuis, Nicolas
Belgodere, Brian
Nitsure, Apoorva
Rigotti, Mattia
Greenewald, Kristjan
Navratil, Jiri
Ross, Jerret
Rios, Jesus
contents We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling efficiency, and memory usage. In addition, a recent analysis of GRPO suggests that estimating the advantage function with off-policy samples could be beneficial. Building on these observations, we adapt GRPO to the off-policy setting. We show that both on-policy and off-policy GRPO objectives yield an improvement in the reward. This result motivates the use of clipped surrogate objectives in the off-policy version of GRPO. We then compare the empirical performance of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in post-training using both GRPO variants. Our results show that off-policy GRPO either significantly outperforms or performs on par with its on-policy counterpart.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Revisiting Group Relative Policy Optimization: Insights into On-Policy and Off-Policy Training
Mroueh, Youssef
Dupuis, Nicolas
Belgodere, Brian
Nitsure, Apoorva
Rigotti, Mattia
Greenewald, Kristjan
Navratil, Jiri
Ross, Jerret
Rios, Jesus
Machine Learning
We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling efficiency, and memory usage. In addition, a recent analysis of GRPO suggests that estimating the advantage function with off-policy samples could be beneficial. Building on these observations, we adapt GRPO to the off-policy setting. We show that both on-policy and off-policy GRPO objectives yield an improvement in the reward. This result motivates the use of clipped surrogate objectives in the off-policy version of GRPO. We then compare the empirical performance of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in post-training using both GRPO variants. Our results show that off-policy GRPO either significantly outperforms or performs on par with its on-policy counterpart.
title Revisiting Group Relative Policy Optimization: Insights into On-Policy and Off-Policy Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22257