Reinforcement Learning

F-GRPO: Don't Let Your Policy Learn the Obvious and Forget the Rare

DDaniil PlyusovAAlexey GorbatovskiBBoris ShaposhnikovVViacheslav SiniiAAlexey MalakhovDDaniil Gavrilov
Published
February 6, 2026
Authors
6
Word Count
10,238

Enhance LLMs with F-GRPO for better rare-solution learning.

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is commonly based on group sampling to estimate advantages and stabilize policy updates. In practice, large group sizes are not feasible due to computational limits, which biases learning toward trajectories that are already likely. Smaller groups often miss rare-correct trajectories while still containing mixed rewards, concentrating probability on common solutions. We derive the probability that updates miss rare-correct modes as a function of group size, showing non-monotonic behavior, and characterize how updates redistribute mass within the correct set, revealing that unsampled-correct mass can shrink even as total correct mass grows. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a difficulty-aware advantage scaling coefficient, inspired by Focal loss, that down-weights updates on high-success prompts. The lightweight modification can be directly integrated into any group-relative RLVR algorithm such as GRPO, DAPO, and CISPO. On Qwen2.5-7B across in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, our method improves pass@256 from 64.1 rightarrow 70.3 (GRPO), 69.3 rightarrow 72.5 (DAPO), and 73.2 rightarrow 76.8 (CISPO), while preserving or improving pass@1, without increasing group size or computational cost.

Key Takeaways

  • 1

    F-GRPO improves model performance on rare-correct solutions.

  • 2

    Difficulty-aware advantage scaling enhances learning efficiency.

  • 3

    F-GRPO maintains or improves single-attempt accuracy.

Limitations

  • Requires empirical success rate as a proxy.

  • Effectiveness varies with different model families.

Keywords

reinforcement learningverifiable rewardsgroup samplingadvantage estimationpolicy updatesFocal lossGRPODAPOCISPOpass@k metrics

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F-GRPO: Don't Let Your Policy Learn the Obvious and Forget the Rare | Paperchime