Mechanism
Samples independent completions per prompt and uses the average reward of the other completions as an unbiased, low-variance prompt-specific baseline without any critic network or standard-deviation division:
Practical Notes
Unbiased gradient estimator (unlike GRPO, which divides by empirical group standard deviation and biases difficulty weighting).
References
- Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs ↗
All 8 authors
Arash Ahmadian, Chris Cremer, Matthias Gallé, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer, Olivier Pietquin, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker