Why GRPO is Important and How it Works

📊 Curious about the rust data we used in this post? Check out the dataset and fine-tune it yourself! Last week on Arxiv Dives we dug into research behind DeepSeek-R1, and uncovered that one of the techniques they use in the their training pipeline is called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). At it’s core, GRPO is a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm that is aimed at improving the model’s reasoning ability. It was first introduced in their paper DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models, but was also used in the post-training of DeepSeek-R1. The process to go from DeepSeek’s base pre-trained language model to a reasoning model was laid out in detail in the DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning paper. Last week we didn’t get too deep into the math or process behind GRPO or look at any code, so today the goal is to fully understand what is going on in GRPO and help apply it to your own wo

Last week on Arxiv Dives we dug into research behind DeepSeek-R1 , and uncovered that one of the techniques they use in the their training pipeline is called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). At it’s core, GRPO is a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm that is aimed at improving the model’s reasoning ability. It was first introduced in their paper DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models , but was also used in the post-training of DeepSeek-R1 . The process to go from DeepSeek’s base pre-trained language model to a reasoning model was laid out

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• Lydia Nottingham
• Timothy Kostolansky

related reading

• A vision researcher’s guide to some RL stuff: PPO & GRPO - Yuge (Jimmy) Shiyugeten.github.io
• RLHF Bookrlhfbook.com
• DeepSeek-R1arxiv.org
• State of RL for reasoning LLMs | A. Weersaweers.de
• Bite: How Deepseek R1 was trainedphilschmid.de
• Lightweight Guide to understanding GRPO and RL principles - Musings of Muraligitlostmurali.com
• Tutorial: Train your own Reasoning model with GRPO | Unsloth Documentationdocs.unsloth.ai
• The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoningmagazine.sebastianraschka.com
• A Guide to Reinforcement Learning Post-Training for LLMs: PPO, DPO, GRPO, and Beyondhuggingface.co
• The 37 Implementation Details of Proximal Policy Optimization · The ICLR Blog Trackiclr-blog-track.github.io
• [2605.03327] DGPO: Distribution Guided Policy Optimization for Fine Grained Credit Assignmentarxiv.org
• From REINFORCE to Dr. GRPOlancelqf.github.io