Researchers debate GRPO at scale: standard formulation, missing batch-size ablations
stochasticchasm · x · 2026-09-22
A researcher reviewed an RL training report and noted it uses a very standard GRPO formulation, without the critic models some teams have adopted despite RL-ing at 1M scale. The author speculates large batches alone may reduce gradient noise enough, even without scaling group size.
- Earlier criticism: Figure 3 doesn't actually support the batch-size claims
- Missing ablations across batch sizes, scaling laws, or FLOPs/wallclock-relative performance
- The author wishes for proper batch-size sensitivity analysis before drawing conclusions
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