C-GRPO: Conformal Group Relative Policy Optimization

Computer Science > Machine Learning

[Submitted on 3 Nov 2026]

Title:C-GRPO: Conformal Group Relative Policy Optimization

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Reasoning-oriented language model training increasingly relies on multiple on-policy rollouts, but standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a fixed group size, wasting compute on easy prompts and under-exploring hard ones. Existing adaptive-budget methods alleviate this inefficiency, yet their stopping rules are heuristic and do not provide a finite-sample calibration guarantee. We propose CGRPO, which replaces the fixed rollout budget of standard GPRO with calibrated conformal thresholds over task-specific nonconformity scores, combining Adaptive Prediction Set (APS)-style calibration for closed-form reasoning, a first-success score for execution-based code, automatic miscoverage selection, and periodic re-calibration. We prove finite-sample coverage for the resulting stopping rule and show that, under monotone policy improvement, recalibration induces a non-increasing expected training budget. Across six benchmarks spanning mathematics, graduate-level science, and code generation, CGRPO reduces mean training rollouts by 49-70% relative to fixed-budget GRPO while retaining strong fixed-budget accuracy, achieves the strongest pass@1 among evaluated static and dynamic baselines on different datasets, and transfers across model families with up to 82% rollout savings.

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