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Main Author: Abrahamsen, Nilin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23353
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author Abrahamsen, Nilin
author_facet Abrahamsen, Nilin
contents This note introduces Isometric Policy Optimization (ISOPO), an efficient method to approximate the natural policy gradient in a single gradient step. In comparison, existing proximal policy methods such as GRPO or CISPO use multiple gradient steps with variants of importance ratio clipping to approximate a natural gradient step relative to a reference policy. In its simplest form, ISOPO normalizes the log-probability gradient of each sequence in the Fisher metric before contracting with the advantages. Another variant of ISOPO transforms the microbatch advantages based on the neural tangent kernel in each layer. ISOPO applies this transformation layer-wise in a single backward pass and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead compared to vanilla REINFORCE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ISOPO: Proximal policy gradients without pi-old
Abrahamsen, Nilin
Machine Learning
This note introduces Isometric Policy Optimization (ISOPO), an efficient method to approximate the natural policy gradient in a single gradient step. In comparison, existing proximal policy methods such as GRPO or CISPO use multiple gradient steps with variants of importance ratio clipping to approximate a natural gradient step relative to a reference policy. In its simplest form, ISOPO normalizes the log-probability gradient of each sequence in the Fisher metric before contracting with the advantages. Another variant of ISOPO transforms the microbatch advantages based on the neural tangent kernel in each layer. ISOPO applies this transformation layer-wise in a single backward pass and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead compared to vanilla REINFORCE.
title ISOPO: Proximal policy gradients without pi-old
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23353