Squeeze the Soaked Sponge: Efficient Off-policy RFT for Large Language Model

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods are inherently on-policy RL, failing to reuse historical data and thus preventing efficient scaling. In this work, we explore the potential of off-policy RL to leverage historical data for rollout-efficient RFT. Specifically, we propose Reincarnating Mix-policy Proximal Policy Gradient (ReMix), which enables on-policy RFT methods to leverage off-policy data. ReMix consists of three major components: (1) Mix-policy proximal policy gradient with an increased Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio that utilizes the data from both current and past policies for efficient training; (2) KL-Convex policy constraint that combines the KL constraints on the base and precedent model to balance stability and flexibility; (3) Policy reincarnation that replaces the base model with the mix-policy RFT model in the mid way of training and restarts on-policy training, to achieve a seamless transition from early efficiency to steady convergence. In our experiments, we train a series of ReMix models based on PPO, GRPO from 1.5B, 7B base models. On five math reasoning benchmarks (i.e., AIME'24, AMC'23, Minerva, OlympiadBench, and MATH500), ReMix achieves an average Pass@1 accuracy of 52.10% (with 0.079M rollouts) and 64.39% (with 0.011M rollouts) on 1.5B and 7B models, respectively. Compared with 15 recent advanced models, ReMix shows SOTA-level performance with an over 30x to 450x reduction in training cost in terms of rollout data volume, demonstrating superior training efficiency. Additionally, our multifaceted analysis reveals insightful findings, including the implicit preference for shorter responses of off-policy RFT, the collapse mode of self-reflection under severe off-policyness, etc. The code and the trained models are available at https://anitaleungxx.github.io/ReMix/ .