Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO)

Last updated: 02/25/2026.

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

✨Getting started

1. Prepare the datasets by running prepare_dapo_data.sh:

bash prepare_dapo_data.sh # This downloads the datasets to ${HOME}/verl/data by default

2. Prepare the model:

hf download Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base --local-dir ${HOME}/verl/models/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base

3. Run the script:

# run DPPO-Binary-KL
LOSS_MODE=dppo_kl bash examples/dppo_trainer/run_qwen30b_dppo.sh

# run DPPO-Binary-TV
LOSS_MODE=dppo_tv bash examples/dppo_trainer/run_qwen30b_dppo.sh

# run GRPO baseline
LOSS_MODE=vanilla CLIP_LOW=0.2 CLIP_HIGH=0.2 bash examples/dppo_trainer/run_qwen30b_dppo.sh
# or GRPO with clip higher
LOSS_MODE=vanilla CLIP_LOW=0.2 CLIP_HIGH=0.28 bash examples/dppo_trainer/run_qwen30b_dppo.sh

📖Introduction

Comparison of PPO and the proposed DPPO (the Binary-TV variant). (Left) The surrogate objective and corresponding masks for PPO and DPPO. PPO (and variants like GRPO) employs a heuristic mask based on the probability ratio. In contrast, DPPO utilizes a more principled mask based on a direct approximation of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation), ensuring updates stay within a theoretically grounded trust region. (Right) Experimental results on the AIME24 using Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base. DPPO significantly outperforms GRPO baselines, achieving superior training stability and final performance even without rollout routing replay (R3).

DPPO variants achieve stable training while controlling the training-inference mismatch at a low level. In contrast, methods without a trust region (PG-IS, CISPO) or with a misspecified one (MiniRL) suffer from growing mismatch and eventual collapse.

The plots show numerical differences between a training and an inference engine for Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base with identical parameters. (Left) The probability ratio (used in PPO) is highly volatile for low-probability tokens. (Right) In contrast, the TV divergence is more stable. This highlights a key flaw of PPO's clipping mechanism: it over-penalizes low-probability tokens, which can slow down learning; and under-penalizes high-probability tokens, which can permit large, destabilizing updates.

The most frequently clipped tokens (by GRPO) are important to the reasoning task! They are dominated by:

• numbers, like 1, 4
• mathematical symbols, like +, -, =
• reasoning and structural Words: Wait, Thus, Next

Top-K divergence approximation

We only implement the DPPO-Binary-TV/DPPO-Binary-KL here due to their simplicity.

For the TopK divergence approximation, please refer to the the original repo for a complete implementation.

Citation

If you find our works useful for your research, please consider citing:

@article{qi2026dppo,
  title={Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning},
  author={Qi, Penghui and Zhou, Xiangxin and Liu, Zichen and Pang, Tianyu and Du, Chao and Lin, Min and Lee, Wee Sun},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04879},
  year={2026}
}

🌻Acknowledgement

We implement our reinforcement learning algorithm extending from verl. We utilize vLLM and sglang for inference. Our models are trained primarily on Qwen3 family. Our training data is built from DAPO-MATH. Thanks for their great contributions!