arXiv:2509.24203cs.LGcs.AI2025-09中稿 · ICLR被引 12

GRPO其实天生支持离线训练,突破了传统认知的算法边界。

Group-Relative REINFORCE Is Secretly an Off-Policy Algorithm: Demystifying Some Myths About GRPO and Its Friends

  • 从基础原理推导出组内均值奖励作为基准的GRPO具有原生离线特性
  • 提出正则化策略与数据分布调控,实现真正离线强化学习
  • 解释了以往看似随意的数据加权为何有效,适合大模型强化学习研究者

大型语言模型的离线强化学习因实际应用限制、模型-强化学习基础设施复杂及方法创新需求而备受关注。尽管经典REINFORCE及其变体(如组相对策略优化GRPO)通常被视为仅适用于在线学习,本文通过无特定数据分布假设的第一性原理推导,证明以组内平均奖励为基线的组相对REINFORCE具有天然的离线解释能力。该视角揭示两个通用原则:对策略更新进行正则化、主动调控数据分布。分析澄清了重要性采样与截断在GRPO中的作用,将近期两种算法——在线策略镜像下降与非对称REINFORCE——统一为正则化形式的REINFORCE损失,并为看似启发式的数据加权策略提供理论支持。实证研究验证了这些发现,推动了大模型离线强化学习的合理算法设计。代码已开源:https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/main/examples/rec_gsm8k。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is attracting growing interest, driven by practical constraints in real-world applications, the complexity of LLM-RL infrastructure, and the need for further innovations of RL methodologies. While classic REINFORCE and its modern variants like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) are typically regarded as on-policy algorithms with limited tolerance of off-policyness, we present in this work a first-principles derivation for group-relative REINFORCE -- a REINFORCE variant that uses the within-group mean reward as the baseline for advantage calculation -- without assuming a specific training data distribution, showing that it admits a native off-policy interpretation. This perspective yields two general principles for adapting REINFORCE to truly off-policy settings: regularizing policy updates, and actively shaping the data distribution. Our analysis demystifies some myths about the roles of importance sampling and clipping in GRPO, unifies and reinterprets two recent algorithms -- Online Policy Mirror Descent and Asymmetric REINFORCE -- as regularized forms of the REINFORCE loss, and offers theoretical justification for seemingly heuristic data-weighting strategies. Our findings lead to actionable insights that are validated with extensive empirical studies, and open up new opportunities for principled algorithm design in off-policy RL for LLMs. Source code for this work is available at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/main/examples/rec_gsm8k.

强化学习大模型离线学习算法设计

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