cs.CVApr 5, 2026

OP-GRPO: Efficient Off-Policy GRPO for Flow-Matching Models

Authors: Liyu Zhang, Kehan Li, Tingrui Han, Tao Zhao, Yuxuan Sheng, Shibo He, Chao Li

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.

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