Revisiting Group Relative Policy Optimization: Insights into On-Policy and Off-Policy Training

Youssef Mroueh, Nicolas Dupuis, Brian Belgodere, Apoorva Nitsure, Mattia Rigotti, Kristjan Greenewald, Jiri Navratil, Jerret Ross, Jesus Rios

arXiv5/28/2025·Read paper

Abstract

We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling efficiency, and memory usage. In addition, a recent analysis of GRPO suggests that estimating the advantage function with off-policy samples could be beneficial. Building on these observations, we adapt GRPO to the off-policy setting. We show that both on-policy and off-policy GRPO objectives yield an improvement in the reward. This result motivates the use of clipped surrogate objectives in the off-policy version of GRPO. We then compare the empirical performance of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in post-training using both GRPO variants. Our results show that off-policy GRPO either significantly outperforms or performs on par with its on-policy counterpart.

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