Gibbs-Gap Policy Optimization for Off-Policy RL with Verifiable Rewards

Xuanchang Zhang, Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards often trains language models on responses generated by a different, possibly stale behavior policy. Correcting this mismatch with learner-to-behavior importance weights can introduce high variance for long responses. We introduce Gibbs-Gap Policy Optimization (GGPO), which minimizes a log-mean-exp contrast of KL-adjusted rewards among responses to the same prompt, without learner-to-behavior importance weights. We derive GGPO from KL-regularized policy optimization: on policy, its population loss is exactly the KL-regularized optimality gap, and under suitable coverage the learner's single-response expected reward is at least the behavior policy's best-of-$K$ reward, minus terms for the raw finite-group loss, regularization, and finite training data. We characterize reference refresh through exact Gibbs-target composition and a finite-data final-policy reward bound under local reference control and tokenwise behavior mismatch. This refresh is empirically important: in an ablation, fixed-reference GGPO scores $32.96$ on the five-benchmark problem-weighted average, versus $46.58$ with the default refresh schedule. Experiments on…