解决流匹配训练中隐式过优化问题,提升生成质量与对齐性。
GRPO-Guard: Mitigating Implicit Over-Optimization in Flow Matching via Regulated Clipping
- 通过比率归一化和梯度重加权,实现稳定裁剪机制。
- 在多个扩散模型上显著降低过优化,图像质量不降反升。
- 无需复杂正则化,适合实际生成任务部署。
近期基于GRPO的强化学习在优化流匹配模型方面取得显著进展,有效提升其与特定任务奖励的对齐性。现有框架依赖重要性比率裁剪来控制过度自信的正负梯度,但实践中发现重要性比率分布系统性左移(均值低于1),且随时间步差异显著,导致正优势样本无法进入裁剪区域,使裁剪机制失效。结果是策略模型陷入隐式过优化状态:代理奖励持续上升,但图像质量与文本提示对齐性急剧下降,最终使学习到的策略难以实用。为此,本文提出GRPO-Guard,一种简单有效的增强方法。引入比率归一化以恢复平衡且时间一致的重要比率分布,确保各去噪时间步的裁剪机制有效;同时采用梯度重加权策略,均衡不同噪声条件下的策略梯度,防止特定时间步更新过强。二者共同构成受控裁剪机制,在多个扩散模型(如SD3.5M、Flux.1-dev)及多样代理任务上实验表明,该方法显著缓解隐式过优化,同时保持甚至提升生成质量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recently, GRPO-based reinforcement learning has shown remarkable progress in optimizing flow-matching models, effectively improving their alignment with task-specific rewards. Within these frameworks, the policy update relies on importance-ratio clipping to constrain overconfident positive and negative gradients. However, in practice, we observe a systematic shift in the importance-ratio distribution-its mean falls below 1 and its variance differs substantially across timesteps. This left-shifted and inconsistent distribution prevents positive-advantage samples from entering the clipped region, causing the mechanism to fail in constraining overconfident positive updates. As a result, the policy model inevitably enters an implicit over-optimization stage-while the proxy reward continues to increase, essential metrics such as image quality and text-prompt alignment deteriorate sharply, ultimately making the learned policy impractical for real-world use. To address this issue, we introduce GRPO-Guard, a simple yet effective enhancement to existing GRPO frameworks. Our method incorporates ratio normalization, which restores a balanced and step-consistent importance ratio, ensuring that PPO clipping properly constrains harmful updates across denoising timesteps. In addition, a gradient reweighting strategy equalizes policy gradients over noise conditions, preventing excessive updates from particular timestep regions. Together, these designs act as a regulated clipping mechanism, stabilizing optimization and substantially mitigating implicit over-optimization without relying on heavy KL regularization. Extensive experiments on multiple diffusion backbones (e.g., SD3.5M, Flux.1-dev) and diverse proxy tasks demonstrate that GRPO-Guard significantly reduces over-optimization while maintaining or even improving generation quality.
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