针对稀疏奖励下策略优化不稳定问题,提出基于滞后机制的改进方法。
HPO: Hysteretic Policy Optimization for Stable and Efficient Training under Sparse-Reward Regime

- 引入滞后权重机制,降低负优势更新的影响
- 采用均值长度归一化,提升训练稳定性与效率
- 自适应设置权重,无需手动调参,适合大规模模型训练
我们研究了在稀疏可验证奖励环境下GRPO类强化学习的一种常见失败模式:早期更新中负优势响应多于正优势响应,而响应级长度归一化使更新幅度与输出长度相关。为此提出滞迟策略优化(HPO),对GRPO进行最小修改,降低负优势更新权重,并将逐响应长度归一化替换为均值长度归一化。进一步提出自适应HPO(A-HPO),根据批次级优势符号统计动态设定滞后权重,避免固定权重调参。在TeleLogs和Countdown实验中,A-HPO相比GRPO提升了每轮更新的奖励,尤其在早期稀疏奖励阶段表现更优。在TeleLogs上,最终奖励达0.84,优于SAPO 5%、GSPO 11%、GRPO 15%,且响应长度相近。在Countdown任务中,1.5B-7B模型在初始及最困难配置下均取得最大提升。消融实验表明,A-HPO的优势在于更好平衡正负优势贡献,而非仅使用正优势或完全对称更新。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We investigate a narrow but common failure mode of GRPO-style reinforcement learning in the context of sparse verifiable rewards: early updates contain more responses with negative advantages than those with positive advantages, while response-level length normalization ties the magnitude of the update to the length of the output. We propose Hysteretic Policy Optimization (HPO), a minimal modification of GRPO that reduces the weight of negative-advantage updates and replaces per-response length normalization with mean-length normalization. We further introduce Adaptive HPO (A-HPO), which sets the hysteretic weight based on batch-level advantage-sign statistics, thereby removing the need for tuning a fixed hysteretic weight. In our TeleLogs and Countdown experiments, A-HPO improves the reward per update compared to GRPO, with the largest gains in early sparse reward regimes. On TeleLogs, A-HPO achieves a final reward of 0.84, outperforming SAPO by 5%, GSPO by 11%, and GRPO by 15%, while maintaining a comparable response-length. On Countdown, A-HPO achieves the largest gains in initial and most difficult configurations across 1.5B-7B models. Ablation studies on the hysteretic weight show that the gains of A-HPO come from better balancing the contributions of positive and negative advantages compared to positive-only or fully symmetric updates.
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