DeepVideo-R1: Video Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Difficulty-aware
  Regressive GRPO
Authors: name: Jinyoung Park; name: Jeehye Na; name: Jinyoung Kim; name: Hyunwoo J. Kim
Published: 2025-06-09 06:15:54

Abstract: Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of reinforcement learning
(RL)-based post-training in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large
language models (LLMs). In particular, Group Relative Policy Optimization
(GRPO) has shown impressive success by employing a PPO-style reinforcement
algorithm with group-based normalized rewards. However, the application of GRPO
to Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) has been less studied. In this
paper, we explore GRPO for video LLMs and identify two primary issues that
impede its effective learning: (1) reliance on safeguards, and (2) the
vanishing advantage problem. To mitigate these challenges, we propose
DeepVideo-R1, a video large language model trained with our proposed Reg-GRPO
(Regressive GRPO) and difficulty-aware data augmentation strategy. Reg-GRPO
reformulates the GRPO objective as a regression task, directly predicting the
advantage in GRPO. This design eliminates the need for safeguards like clipping
and min functions, thereby facilitating more direct policy guidance by aligning
the model with the advantage values. We also design the difficulty-aware data
augmentation strategy that dynamically augments training samples at solvable
difficulty levels, fostering diverse and informative reward signals. Our
comprehensive experiments show that DeepVideo-R1 significantly improves video
reasoning performance across multiple video reasoning benchmarks.