MAPO: Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization
Authors: name: Wenke Huang; name: Quan Zhang; name: Yiyang Fang; name: Jian Liang; name: Xuankun Rong; name: Huanjin Yao; name: Guancheng Wan; name: Ke Liang; name: Wenwen He; name: Mingjun Li; name: Leszek Rutkowski; name: Mang Ye; name: Bo Du; name: Dacheng Tao
Published: 2025-09-23 09:37:16

Abstract: Recent advances in reinforcement learning for foundation models, such as
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have significantly improved the
performance of foundation models on reasoning tasks. Notably, the advantage
function serves as a central mechanism in GRPO for ranking the trajectory
importance. However, existing explorations encounter both advantage reversion
and advantage mirror problems, which hinder the reasonable advantage allocation
across different query samples. In this work, we propose an easy but effective
GRPO strategy, Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization (MAPO). We reveal that the
trajectory appears with different certainty and propose the advantage percent
deviation for samples with high-certainty trajectories. Furthermore, we
dynamically reweight the advantage function for samples with varying trajectory
certainty, thereby adaptively configuring the advantage function to account for
sample-specific characteristics. Comparison with related state-of-the-art
methods, along with ablation studies on different advantage variants, validates
the effectiveness of our approach.