OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models
Organizations: College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University · Central Research Institute, Huawei
Abstract
Post training via GRPO has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving the generation quality of flow-matching models. However, GRPO suffers from inherently low sample efficiency due to its on-policy training paradigm. To address this limitation, we present OP-GRPO, the first Off-Policy GRPO framework tailored for flow-matching models. First, we actively select high-quality trajectories and adaptively incorporate them into a replay buffer for reuse in subsequent training iterations. Second, to mitigate the distribution shift introduced by off-policy samples, we propose a sequence-level importance sampling correction that preserves the integrity of GRPO's clipping mechanism while ensuring stable policy updates. Third, we theoretically and empirically show that late denoising steps yield ill-conditioned off-policy ratios, and mitigate this by truncating trajectories at late steps. Across image and video generation benchmarks, OP-GRPO achieves comparable or superior performance to Flow-GRPO with only 34.2% of the training steps on average, yielding substantial gains in training efficiency while maintaining generation quality.
Figures & tables
| Model | Step | Task Metric | Image Quality | Preference Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aesthetic | DeQA | ImgRwd | PickScore | UniRwd | |||
| SD3.5-M | — | 0.63 / 0.59 / 21.72 | 5.31 | 4.07 | 0.92 | 22.18 | 3.29 |
| Compositional Image Generation | |||||||
| Flow-GRPO | 1020 | 0.68 | 5.27 | 4.05 | 1.37 | 22.24 | 3.35 |
| OP-GRPO | 1020 | 0.88 | 5.22 | 4.02 | 1.21 | 22.35 | 3.49 |
| Flow-GRPO | Best | 0.95 | 5.18 | 4.00 | 1.12 | 22.37 | 3.51 |
| Model | Color | Shape | 2D-Spatial | 3D-Spatial | Numeracy | Non-Spatial | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FLUX.1 Dev [ 13 ] | 0.738 | 0.574 | 0.289 | 0.391 | 0.621 | 0.315 | 0.488 |
| SD3.5-M [ 5 ] | 0.796 | 0.569 | 0.283 | 0.376 | 0.595 | 0.312 | 0.489 |
| Intermediate checkpoints | |||||||
| SD3.5-M+Flow-GRPO | 0.769 | 0.578 | 0.412 | 0.405 | 0.644 | 0.312 | 0.520 |
| SD3.5-M+OP-GRPO | 0.824 | 0.603 | 0.498 | 0.437 | 0.660 | 0.318 | 0.567 |
| Best checkpoints | |||||||