G^2RPO: Granular GRPO for Precise Reward in Flow Models
Authors: name: Yujie Zhou, name: Pengyang Ling, name: Jiazi Bu, name: Yibin Wang, name: Yuhang Zang, name: Jiaqi Wang, name: Li Niu, name: Guangtao Zhai
Organization: IXCLab@Shanghai AI Lab

The integration of online reinforcement learning (RL) into diffusion and flow
models has recently emerged as a promising approach for aligning generative
models with human preferences. Stochastic sampling via Stochastic Differential
Equations (SDE) is employed during the denoising process to generate diverse
denoising directions for RL exploration. While existing methods effectively
explore potential high-value samples, they suffer from sub-optimal preference
alignment due to sparse and narrow reward signals. To address these challenges,
we propose a novel Granular-GRPO (G^2RPO ) framework that achieves
precise and comprehensive reward assessments of sampling directions in
reinforcement learning of flow models. Specifically, a Singular Stochastic
Sampling strategy is introduced to support step-wise stochastic exploration
while enforcing a high correlation between the reward and the injected noise,
thereby facilitating a faithful reward for each SDE perturbation. Concurrently,
to eliminate the bias inherent in fixed-granularity denoising, we introduce a
Multi-Granularity Advantage Integration module that aggregates advantages
computed at multiple diffusion scales, producing a more comprehensive and
robust evaluation of the sampling directions. Experiments conducted on various
reward models, including both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations,
demonstrate that our G^2RPO significantly outperforms existing
flow-based GRPO baselines,highlighting its effectiveness and robustness.