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

**Authors:** Youssef Mroueh, Nicolas Dupuis, Brian Belgodere, Apoorva Nitsure, Mattia Rigotti, Kristjan Greenewald, Jiri Navratil, Jerret Ross, Jesus Rios  
**arXiv:** [2505.22257](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22257)  
**Date:** 2025-05-28  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/fr/paper/2505.22257v2/

## 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.