arXiv:2508.02833cs.LG2025-08被引 12

提出更高效稳定的强化学习优化算法,无需价值函数评估

TIC-GRPO: Provable and Efficient Optimization for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

  • 用轨迹级概率比替代逐词重要性权重,直接估计当前策略梯度
  • 在数学推理与编程任务中性能优于原GRPO,收敛速度更快
  • 首次证明此类算法的收敛性,适合大模型对齐训练场景

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) 是一种无需价值函数的强化学习算法,用于微调大语言模型。其通过组归一化奖励替代PPO中的价值函数,并保留基于旧策略的逐令牌重要性采样。理论分析表明,GRPO更新规则实际估计的是旧策略的梯度,但由于旧策略每几步刷新一次,偏差可忽略。实验验证:移除重要性采样并固定旧策略进行多步优化,性能仍与标准GRPO相当。受此启发,本文提出轨迹级重要性校正的GRPO(TIC-GRPO),将逐词重要性比替换为单个轨迹级概率比,从而获得当前策略梯度的无偏估计,同时保持无评判器结构。此外,首次给出GRPO类方法的收敛性分析,证明TIC-GRPO收敛速度优于GRPO。在数学推理和编程任务上的实证结果进一步证实其优越性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), recently introduced by DeepSeek, is a critic-free reinforcement learning algorithm for fine-tuning large language models. GRPO replaces the value function in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with group-normalized rewards while retaining PPO-style token-level importance sampling based on an old policy. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the GRPO update rule estimates the policy gradient at the old policy rather than the current one; however, since the old policy is refreshed every few steps, the resulting discrepancy remains small and the induced bias is negligible in practice. To empirically validate this insight, we conduct an ablation study that entirely removes importance sampling and performs multiple optimization steps using gradients estimated at a fixed old policy. Remarkably, this simplified variant attains performance comparable to standard GRPO. Motivated by this finding, we propose Trajectory-level Importance-Corrected GRPO (TIC-GRPO), a new algorithm that replaces token-level importance ratios with a single trajectory-level probability ratio, thereby yielding an estimate of the current policy gradient while preserving the critic-free structure. Furthermore, we present the first convergence analysis for GRPO-style methods and show that TIC-GRPO converges faster than GRPO. Finally, empirical results across math reasoning and coding tasks demonstrate the superiority of TIC-GRPO.

强化学习大模型对齐无评价值函数优化算法

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。