用可学习的拒绝门替代重要性采样,提升强化学习稳定性与效率。
Beyond Importance Sampling: Rejection-Gated Policy Optimization

- 引入平滑可微的拒绝门控制样本信任度,替代传统重要性权重。
- 在重尾分布下仍保证梯度方差有界,且偏差可控,逼近单调改进。
- 适合作为大模型偏好对齐的在线优化器,性能超越PPO-RLHF。
我们提出一种新的策略优化视角:与其对所有样本按重要性比例重新加权,不如筛选出可信样本驱动策略更新。基于此,我们提出拒绝门策略优化(RGPO),将重要性采样比 r_theta = pi_theta / pi_old 替换为范围 [0,1] 内的平滑可微接受门 alpha_theta(s, a) = g(r_theta(s, a))。不同于以往在训练前以拒绝采样作为数据级启发法,RGPO 将拒绝提升为优化原则:该门直接参与梯度计算,并与策略隐式同步更新。RGPO 提供统一框架:TRPO、PPO 和 REINFORCE 的策略梯度均对应特定形式的有效梯度权重 w(r) = g'(r) * r。我们证明,即使重要性采样比具有重尾分布(此时 IS 方差发散),RGPO 仍能保证有限且有界的梯度方差。进一步表明,RGPO 仅引入有界可控偏差,并提供类 TRPO 的近似单调策略改进保证。RGPO 计算成本与 PPO 相当,无需二阶优化,且自然拓展至 RLHF 风格偏好对齐。在 Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct 上进行在线偏好微调(Anthropic HH-RLHF,n = 3 种随机种子),采用双比率门锚定至旧策略与参考模型,实现帕累托最优:奖励最高(较 PPO-RLHF 提升 +14.8%),且相对于参考模型的 KL 散度最低(较 PPO-RLHF 降低 -16.0%,较 GRPO 降低 -53.1%)。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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).
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