Group Relative Policy Optimization for Image Captioning

Abstract: Image captioning tasks usually use two-stage training to complete model optimization. The first stage uses cross-entropy as the loss function for optimization, and the second stage uses self-critical sequence training (SCST) for reinforcement learning optimization. However, the SCST algorithm has certain defects. SCST relies only on a single greedy decoding result as a baseline. If the model itself is not stable enough, the greedy decoding result may be relatively worst, which will lead to a high variance of advantage estimation, further leading to unstable policy updates. In addition, SCST only compares one sampling result with the greedy decoding result, and the generation diversity is limited, which may fall into a local optimum. In this paper, we propose using the latest Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning algorithm as an optimization solution for the second stage. GRPO generates multiple candidate captions for the input image and then continuously optimizes the model through intragroup comparison. By constraining the amplitude of policy updates and KL divergence, the stability of the model during training is greatly guaranteed. In addition, compared to SCST, which only samples one answer, GRPO samples and generates multiple answers. Multiple candidate answers in the group cover a wider solution space. Combined with KL divergence constraints, GRPO can improve diversity while ensuring model stability. The code for this article is available at https://github.com/liangxu-one/ms-models/tree/image_caption_grpo/research/arxiv_papers/Image_Caption_GRPO.