只用正向反馈优化大模型推理,效果不输传统方法
Beyond Negative Rollouts: Positive-Only Policy Optimization with Implicit Negative Gradients

- 仅通过正向采样生成梯度,避免负样本复杂设计
- 在AIME 2025上达36.67%准确率,超越GRPO的30.00%
- 适合资源有限或追求稳定训练的强化学习研究者
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)因确定性验证,已成为提升大语言模型推理能力的主要范式。从PPO到群组相对策略优化(GRPO)的演进中,GRPO通过分组正负采样简化优势估计。然而我们发现,负采样难以体现失败严重性差异,且组合爆炸导致少量负样本难以捕捉有效奖励信号,尤其在稀疏二值奖励下。本文提出仅使用正向采样的新框架POPO,通过正向采样集上的有界重要性采样实现学习,无需独立负样本提供梯度。我们证明,通过重分配采样概率可自然产生隐式负梯度。为稳定优化,POPO采用孪生策略网络与动量适应律,并以有界相似性惩罚替代KL散度。在Qwen系列等文本大模型上,对全层级数学基准测试进行实验,结果表明POPO性能媲美或优于GRPO。特别地,使用Qwen-Math-7B在AIME 2025上达到36.67%,优于GRPO的30.00%。消融与参数扫描进一步验证了各组件的必要性与鲁棒性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), in which GRPO reduces the complicated advantage estimation with simple estimation over grouped positive and negative rollouts. However, we note that negative rollouts may admit no gradation of failure severity, and the combinatorial vastness makes penalizing a few sampled negatives unlikely to cover a meaningful reward signal under sparse binary rewards. In this work, we propose Positive-Only Policy Optimization (POPO), a novel RLVR framework in which learning can occur exclusively via online positive rollouts. Specifically, POPO utilizes bounded importance sampling over the positive rollout set. Thus, no disjoint negative rollouts are used for the gradient guidance. We show that implicit negative gradients can emerge naturally through reinforcing the positive probability via rollouts redistribution. Next, POPO stabilizes the policy optimization through two mechanisms. First, it applies a siamese policy network with a momentum-based adaptation law for stabilized policy evolution. Second, we replace the KL-divergence with a bounded similarity penalty term in the siamese representation space. We conduct extensive experiments using publicly available, well-established text-LLM models, e.g., the Qwen family, across all-level mathematical benchmarks. Our experiment demonstrates that POPO achieves performance comparable to, or even superior to GRPO. Notably, we show that POPO can achieve 36.67% in AIME 2025 with Qwen-Math-7B, outperforming GRPO 30.00%. Our ablation and sweep studies further illustrate the necessity and robustness of POPO components.
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