Stabilizing Off-policy LLM Optimization with Prefix Importance Ratio

arXiv:2601.22718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has increasingly demonstrated strong ability to elicit reasoning behaviors in large language models (LLMs). For training efficiency, rollouts are typically generated in an off-policy manner using an older sampling policy and then used to update the current target policy. To correct the resulting discrepancy between the sampling and target policies, most existing RL objectives rely on a token-level importance sampling ratio. However, we observe unstable training dynamics in existing importance-weighted objectives under large policy lag. In this paper, we revisit LLM policy optimization under off-policy conditions and show that the exact correction for the prefix-marginal policy gradient is the cumulative prefix importance ratio. Token-level weighting does not explicitly correct for this prefix distribution shift. To stabilize LLM optimization under large off-policy drift, we propose a simple yet effective objective, Minimum Prefix Ratio (MinPRO). MinPRO replaces the unstable cumulative prefix ratio with a biased, non-cumulative surrogate based on the minimum token-level ratio observed in the preceding prefix. Extensive experiments on both dense and mixture-of-experts LLMs, across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrate that MinPRO substantially improves training stability and peak performance in off-policy regimes.

Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has increasingly demonstrated strong ability to elicit reasoning behaviors in large language models (LLMs). For training efficiency, rollouts are typically generated in an off-policy manner using an older sampling policy and then used to update the current target policy. To correct the resulting discrepancy between the sampling and target policies, most existing RL objectives rely on a token-level importance sampling ratio. However, we observe unstable training dynamics in existing importance-weighted objectives under large policy lag. In this paper, we revisit LLM policy optimization under off-policy conditions and show that the exact correction for the prefix-marginal policy gradient is the cumulative prefix importance ratio. Token-level weighting does not explicitly correct for this prefix distribution shift. To stabilize LLM optimization under large off-policy drift, we propose a simple yet effective objective, Minimum Prefix Ratio (MinPRO). MinPRO replaces the unstable cumulative prefix ratio with a biased, non-cumulative surrogate based on the minimum token-level ratio observed in the preceding prefix. Extensive experiments on both dense and mixture-of-experts LLMs, across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrate that MinPRO substantially improves training stability and peak performance in off-policy regimes.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2601.22718 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2601.22718v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.22718 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Stabilizing Off-policy LLM Optimization with Prefix Importance Ratio

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