GRPO-Guard: Mitigating Implicit Over-Optimization in Flow Matching via Regulated Clipping

TL;DR

GRPO-Guard enhances flow-matching reinforcement learning by stabilizing importance ratios and gradient updates, effectively preventing over-optimization and improving model robustness without heavy regularization.

Contribution

The paper introduces GRPO-Guard, a novel method that normalizes importance ratios and reweights gradients to mitigate implicit over-optimization in flow-matching models.

Findings

Significantly reduces over-optimization in diffusion models.

Maintains or improves image quality and alignment metrics.

Effective across multiple diffusion backbones and tasks.

Abstract

Recently, GRPO-based reinforcement learning has shown remarkable progress in optimizing flow-matching models, effectively improving their alignment with task-specific rewards. Within these frameworks, the policy update relies on importance-ratio clipping to constrain overconfident positive and negative gradients. However, in practice, we observe a systematic shift in the importance-ratio distribution-its mean falls below 1 and its variance differs substantially across timesteps. This left-shifted and inconsistent distribution prevents positive-advantage samples from entering the clipped region, causing the mechanism to fail in constraining overconfident positive updates. As a result, the policy model inevitably enters an implicit over-optimization stage-while the proxy reward continues to increase, essential metrics such as image quality and text-prompt alignment deteriorate sharply, ultimately making the learned policy impractical for real-world use. To address this issue, we introduce GRPO-Guard, a simple yet effective enhancement to existing GRPO frameworks. Our method incorporates ratio normalization, which restores a balanced and step-consistent importance ratio, ensuring that PPO clipping properly constrains harmful updates across denoising timesteps. In addition, a gradient reweighting strategy equalizes policy gradients over noise conditions, preventing excessive updates from particular timestep regions. Together, these designs act as a regulated clipping mechanism, stabilizing optimization and substantially mitigating implicit over-optimization without relying on heavy KL regularization. Extensive experiments on multiple diffusion backbones (e.g., SD3.5M, Flux.1-dev) and diverse proxy tasks demonstrate that GRPO-Guard significantly reduces over-optimization while maintaining or even improving generation quality.