SetGRPO: Calibrating Grader-Induced Policy Optimization

Abstract

Rubric-based reinforcement learning uses fine-grained grader feedback to train large language models on open-ended tasks, but grader randomness can alter GRPO updates in ways that score discrepancies alone cannot characterize. Because GRPO jointly normalizes rewards within each response group and combines the resulting training coefficients with response-level gradients, a scoring discrepancy can shift the coefficients of the entire group and induce policy-dependent update changes. Selective execution further affects the direction-reversal risk of retained updates. To address this, we propose Set-Valued Group Relative Policy Optimization (SetGRPO). It comprises three modules: (a) Joint Reward Set Calibration constructs a joint uncertainty set for the training coefficients; (b) Geometry-Guided Safe Recovery maps candidate coefficients into the current policy's local update geometry and determines the largest safe recovery ratio for each response group; and (c) Selective Risk-Gated Optimization selects a global threshold through independent risk calibration to control the conditional direction-reversal risk of accepted updates while preserving the original GRPO objective. Under exchangeability, SetGRPO provides finite-sample marginal coverage for the joint coefficient set and simultaneous risk control across candidate thresholds. On ten open-ended benchmarks spanning three domains, SetGRPO achieves the highest macro average among all compared training methods on both Qwen3.5 and Llama3.2 model families.