arXiv:2509.21154cs.LGcs.AI2025-09中稿 · ICML被引 8

GRPO其实暗含过程奖励机制,可提升大模型推理性能。

GRPO is Secretly a Process Reward Model

  • 发现标准GRPO隐含了基于蒙特卡洛的过程奖励模型
  • 提出λ-GRPO改进算法,显著提升大模型推理效果
  • 无需额外训练成本,适合优化大模型推理能力

过程奖励模型(PRMs)可在强化学习中实现细粒度信用分配,与仅对整个轨迹赋予单一奖励的结果奖励模型(ORMs)看似对立。本文理论证明,在温和假设下,配备ORM的分组相对策略优化(GRPO)算法等价于配备非平凡、基于蒙特卡洛的过程奖励模型(PRM)的强化学习目标。利用GRPO作为PRM的框架,我们识别出GRPO目标在处理不平衡过程步骤与奖励时,会分别阻碍探索与利用。为此提出简单修正算法λ-GRPO,实验表明使用λ-GRPO训练的大语言模型在下游推理任务上优于标准GRPO,且达到峰值性能更快。结果表明,可利用原始GRPO中隐藏的内置PRM结构提升模型性能,无需显式引入PRM,且训练时间与成本几乎不变。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide theoretical proof in this work that the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) RL algorithm equipped with an ORM is in fact equivalent to a PRM-aware RL objective equipped with a non-trivial, Monte-Carlo-based PRM (given mild assumptions). Leveraging the framework of GRPO-as-a-PRM, we identify a flaw in the GRPO objective that interacts with imbalanced process steps and rewards to hinder both exploration and exploitation (under different conditions). We propose a simple modification to the algorithm to mitigate this defect ($λ$-GRPO), and show that LLMs tuned with $λ$-GRPO outperform LLMs tuned with standard GRPO on downstream reasoning tasks\textemdash and reach peak performance more rapidly. These results show that we can leverage the hidden, built-in PRM structure within the vanilla GRPO algorithm to boost model performance without employing an explicit PRM, and with a negligible impact on training time and cost.

强化学习大模型推理优化奖励建模

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