Beyond Importance Sampling: Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866915940460920832 |
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| author | Sun, Ziwu Gao, Zhen Zhang, Jiyong Li, Jiaheng |
| author_facet | Sun, Ziwu Gao, Zhen Zhang, Jiyong Li, Jiaheng |
| contents | We propose a new perspective on policy optimization: rather than reweighting all samples by their importance ratios, an optimizer should select which samples are trustworthy enough to drive a policy update. Building on this view, we introduce Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization (RGPO), which replaces the importance sampling ratio r_theta = pi_theta / pi_old with a smooth, differentiable acceptance gate alpha_theta(s, a) = g(r_theta(s, a)) in the range [0, 1]. Unlike prior work that applies rejection sampling as a data-level heuristic before training, RGPO elevates rejection to an optimization principle: the gate participates directly in gradient computation and is implicitly updated alongside the policy. RGPO provides a unified framework: the policy gradients of TRPO, PPO, and REINFORCE all correspond to specific choices of the effective gradient weight w(r) = g'(r) * r. We prove that RGPO guarantees finite, bounded gradient variance even when importance sampling ratios are heavy-tailed (where IS variance diverges). We further show that RGPO incurs only a bounded, controllable bias and provides an approximate monotonic policy improvement guarantee analogous to TRPO. RGPO matches PPO in computational cost, requires no second-order optimization, and extends naturally to RLHF-style preference alignment. In online preference fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct on Anthropic HH-RLHF (n = 3 seeds), RGPO uses a dual-ratio gate that anchors learning to both the previous policy and the reference model, achieving a Pareto-dominant outcome: the highest reward among online RL methods (+14.8% vs. PPO-RLHF) and the lowest KL divergence to the reference model (-16.0% vs. PPO-RLHF, -53.1% vs. GRPO). |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14895 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond Importance Sampling: Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization Sun, Ziwu Gao, Zhen Zhang, Jiyong Li, Jiaheng Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence We propose a new perspective on policy optimization: rather than reweighting all samples by their importance ratios, an optimizer should select which samples are trustworthy enough to drive a policy update. Building on this view, we introduce Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization (RGPO), which replaces the importance sampling ratio r_theta = pi_theta / pi_old with a smooth, differentiable acceptance gate alpha_theta(s, a) = g(r_theta(s, a)) in the range [0, 1]. Unlike prior work that applies rejection sampling as a data-level heuristic before training, RGPO elevates rejection to an optimization principle: the gate participates directly in gradient computation and is implicitly updated alongside the policy. RGPO provides a unified framework: the policy gradients of TRPO, PPO, and REINFORCE all correspond to specific choices of the effective gradient weight w(r) = g'(r) * r. We prove that RGPO guarantees finite, bounded gradient variance even when importance sampling ratios are heavy-tailed (where IS variance diverges). We further show that RGPO incurs only a bounded, controllable bias and provides an approximate monotonic policy improvement guarantee analogous to TRPO. RGPO matches PPO in computational cost, requires no second-order optimization, and extends naturally to RLHF-style preference alignment. In online preference fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct on Anthropic HH-RLHF (n = 3 seeds), RGPO uses a dual-ratio gate that anchors learning to both the previous policy and the reference model, achieving a Pareto-dominant outcome: the highest reward among online RL methods (+14.8% vs. PPO-RLHF) and the lowest KL divergence to the reference model (-16.0% vs. PPO-RLHF, -53.1% vs. GRPO). |
| title | Beyond Importance Sampling: Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14895 |