MMR-GRPO: Accelerating GRPO-Style Training through Diversity-Aware Reward Reweighting

Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive. Although recent work has reduced the number of training steps required to reach peak performance, the overall wall-clock training time often remains unchanged or even increases due to higher per-step cost. We propose MMR-GRPO, which integrates Maximal Marginal Relevance to reweigh rewards based on completion diversity. Our key insight is that semantically redundant completions contribute limited marginal learning signal; prioritizing diverse solutions yields more informative updates and accelerates convergence. Extensive evaluations across three model sizes (1.5B, 7B, 8B), three GRPO variants, and five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that MMR-GRPO achieves comparable peak performance while requiring on average 47.9% fewer training steps and 70.2% less wall-clock time. These gains are consistent across models, methods, and benchmarks. We will release our code, trained models, and experimental protocols.