Bayes-Adaptive MDPs for Rollout Allocation to Enhance GRPO Training
Faeze Moradi Kalarde, Armin Toroghi, Nam Ho Koh, Doo Hwan Hwang, Seungjin Kim, Kee-Eung Kim, Scott Sanner
Abstract
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong performance in LLM post-training. However, it allocates a uniform rollout budget to every training question, ignoring variations in question difficulty. As a result, highly difficult questions may receive too few rollouts to generate informative positive reward signals, limiting their contribution to training, while moderately difficult questions often receive more rollouts than necessary. In this work, we formulate the problem of difficulty-aware rollout budget allocation to maximize training utility under the same total rollout budget as standard GRPO. We propose AdaRoll-GRPO, which reformulates rollout allocation as a sequential decision-making problem and leverages a Bayes-adaptive Markov decision process (MDP) to learn an adaptive allocation policy. The learned policy is computed offline and applied during GRPO training without introducing additional online optimization overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning datasets and LLM architectures demonstrate that AdaRoll-GRPO consistently improves GRPO training performance under a fixed rollout budget, highlighting the effectiveness of adaptive rollout allocation for GRPO in LLM post-training.