Reinforcement Learning (6): PPO and TRPO — Trust Region Policy Optimization

Policy gradients (Part 3 ) optimise the policy directly, sidestepping discrete argmax operators and naturally handling stochastic strategies. They have one fatal flaw: a single overlong step can destroy the policy, and because the data distribution is coupled to the policy, recovery is nearly impossible.

Trust-region methods make this concrete: bound the change in behaviour, not in parameters, at every update. TRPO does this with a hard KL constraint and a second-order solver. PPO mimics the same effect with one line of clipped arithmetic. The simpler trick won: PPO trains OpenAI Five, ChatGPT’s RLHF stage, and almost every modern robotics policy, remaining the workhorse of applied deep RL.

What You Will Learn#

• Why vanilla policy gradient is catastrophically unstable, with a worked example
• Importance sampling as the bridge that lets us reuse off-policy data
• TRPO: monotonic-improvement bound, natural gradient, conjugate gradient, line search
• PPO-Clip and PPO-Penalty: two ways to approximate a trust region with first-order optimisation
• PPO inside RLHF: how it aligns ChatGPT-class models, and where DPO/IPO/KTO fit
• A practical hyperparameter and debugging guide that mirrors what you’d find in cleanrl or Stable Baselines 3

Prerequisites: Part 3 (REINFORCE, Actor-Critic, advantage). Familiarity with KL divergence and Fisher information helps but is not required — both are introduced in context.

Why policy updates are unstable#

A pathological example#

Say the current policy at state $s$ assigns $\pi(a_1|s) = 0.9$ and $\pi(a_2|s) = 0.1$ . By bad luck we sample $a_2$ and the environment hands back a reward of $+100$ . The REINFORCE estimator multiplies the score $\nabla_\theta \log \pi(a_2|s) = -1/\pi(a_2|s)\cdot\nabla_\theta\pi(a_2|s)$ by $+100$ , then takes a gradient step. After one update the probability of $a_2$ may jump from $0.1$ to $0.7$ even though, on expectation, $a_2$ might be far worse than $a_1$ .

Three pathologies are at play here:

1. Variance explosion. The score function carries a $1/\pi$ factor, so rare actions induce gigantic gradient magnitudes — the same reason “off-policy” REINFORCE is unstable.
2. Distribution shift. The next batch of trajectories is collected by the new policy. If the new policy is bad, every datapoint we collect from it confirms a worse signal — a feedback loop.
3. Irreversibility. A supervised model only loses fit on a bad step; an RL agent loses data on a bad step, and policy collapse can take an order of magnitude more samples to reverse than to cause.

Parameter space lies; policy space tells the truth#

Consider two Gaussian policies $\pi_1 = \mathcal{N}(0, 0.01)$ and $\pi_2 = \mathcal{N}(0, 10)$ . The Euclidean distance between their parameters (mean and log-std) is small, yet $\pi_1$ is essentially deterministic at zero while $\pi_2$ is nearly uniform across the action range. The induced behaviours — and hence the rewards — are completely different.

The lesson: a fixed step in parameter space can cause an unbounded change in policy behaviour. Any safety guarantee must therefore live in distribution space. The Kullback-Leibler divergence $D_{KL}(\pi_{\text{old}} \| \pi_\theta)$ is the natural metric.

The figure makes the geometry concrete: the green-to-red surface is a hypothetical $J(\theta)$ landscape with a narrow ridge of high reward and a sharp cliff. Vanilla policy gradient (left) takes a giant step along the gradient direction and lands on the cliff. TRPO (right) constrains every step to a KL ball around the current iterate; the trajectory hugs the ridge and converges to a safe optimum.

Importance sampling: the bridge to off-policy data#

The probability ratio $r_t(\theta) = \pi_\theta(a_t|s_t)/\pi_{\text{old}}(a_t|s_t)$ is the central object of every algorithm in this post.

Two facts to keep in mind:

• At $\theta = \theta_{\text{old}}$ , $L^{\text{IS}}$ has the same value and gradient as the true policy-gradient objective $J(\theta)$ — so it is locally faithful.
• Far from $\theta_{\text{old}}$ , the variance of the IS estimator grows roughly as $\exp(2\,D_{KL})$ (figure below). Tiny KL = trustworthy reuse; large KL = noisy garbage.

The left panel histograms the ratio $r_t$ as the new and old policies drift apart — the distribution stays tight inside the green PPO clip zone $[0.8, 1.2]$ for $D_{KL}\!\le\!0.02$ , and develops a heavy right tail beyond $D_{KL}\!=\!0.05$ . The right panel plots the variance of the IS estimator on a log scale; the orange shaded region is the variance “saved” by clipping. This is the quantitative argument for keeping every update inside a small trust region.

TRPO: trust region policy optimization#

The monotonic-improvement bound#

where $C = 4\varepsilon\gamma/(1-\gamma)^2$ depends on the maximum advantage magnitude $\varepsilon$ and the discount factor $\gamma$ . The corollary is striking: as long as we improve the surrogate while keeping $D_{KL}^{\max}$ small, monotonic policy improvement is guaranteed.

In practice the constant $C$ is too pessimistic to be useful; TRPO replaces the penalty with a hard constraint and tunes it empirically.

The constrained problem#

with $\delta \approx 0.01$ . The mean KL is used in place of the maximum because it is much cheaper to estimate from samples.

Natural gradient: the right notion of “small”#

Solving the constrained problem yields the natural gradient update $\Delta\theta \propto F^{-1}\nabla J$ . It is the steepest ascent direction in policy space, not parameter space, which is exactly what we want.

Implementation: conjugate gradient + line search#

For a network with millions of parameters, $F$ has $\sim 10^{12}$ entries — forming it explicitly is impossible. TRPO sidesteps this with two tricks:

1. Conjugate gradient to solve $Fx = g$ using only Fisher-vector products $Fv$ (cheap to compute via two autograd passes, no matrix is materialised).
2. Backtracking line search along the natural-gradient direction, halving the step until the KL constraint is satisfied and the surrogate improves — this preserves the monotonicity guarantee even when the quadratic approximation is loose.

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def conjugate_gradient(fisher_vector_product, b, n_steps=10, tol=1e-10):
    """Solve F x = b without materialising F. Costs n_steps * (Fv) ops."""
    x = torch.zeros_like(b)
    r = b.clone()
    p = r.clone()
    rdotr = r.dot(r)
    for _ in range(n_steps):
        Ap = fisher_vector_product(p)
        alpha = rdotr / (p.dot(Ap) + 1e-8)
        x += alpha * p
        r -= alpha * Ap
        new_rdotr = r.dot(r)
        if new_rdotr < tol:
            break
        p = r + (new_rdotr / rdotr) * p
        rdotr = new_rdotr
    return x

# After CG: step length is fixed by the KL budget delta
step = torch.sqrt(2 * delta / (x.dot(fisher_vector_product(x)) + 1e-8)) * x
# Backtracking line search ensures both KL <= delta AND surrogate improves.

Strengths. Theoretically sound monotonic improvement; very stable on hard control tasks (Humanoid, Ant) where vanilla PG diverges.

Weaknesses. ~300 lines of careful code, ~10-20 Hessian-vector products per update, almost no benefit from running multiple epochs over a batch (CG already used the curvature information). Hard to scale to distributed training because conjugate gradient requires per-step synchronisation.

PPO: keeping 90% of the benefit at 20% of the complexity#

In 2017 Schulman and colleagues asked: can we get TRPO-like stability using only first-order optimisation? The answer was PPO, and it has dominated the field ever since.

PPO-Clip: the central trick#

with $\varepsilon \approx 0.2$ . The construction is asymmetric on purpose: the min makes the objective pessimistic, picking whichever of the clipped and unclipped quantities is smaller.

The two cases (and a one-line summary of each) are:

• $\hat{A}>0$ (a good action). The unclipped surrogate keeps growing as $r_t \to \infty$ ; the clip caps the reward for $r_t > 1+\varepsilon$ . The min then takes the cap, so the gradient drops to zero past the cap. Translation: don’t push the probability of a sampled good action above $(1+\varepsilon)\pi_{\text{old}}$ on the strength of one minibatch.
• $\hat{A}<0$ (a bad action). Symmetric: the clip caps how negative the loss can get for $r_t < 1-\varepsilon$ , so once the new policy has reduced the probability by enough, the gradient stops. Don’t crush a single bad-luck action.

The deeper question is: why use min, not max? If we always take whichever surrogate is larger, we’d reward huge ratios — the optimiser would happily blow past the trust region. The min bakes in the trust-region intuition without ever computing a KL.

PPO-Penalty: the adaptive cousin#

with $\beta$ adjusted after every iteration: doubled when measured KL exceeds $1.5\,\delta_{\text{target}}$ , halved when below $\delta_{\text{target}}/1.5$ .

The left panel shows how $\beta$ shapes the objective: $\beta=0$ recovers the unconstrained surrogate (and its instability); large $\beta$ makes the optimum hug $\theta_{\text{old}}$ . The right panel shows a real adaptive schedule — $\beta$ moves over orders of magnitude on a log axis to keep the observed KL near its target. Adaptive KL is what early InstructGPT used internally before clip-style PPO became the default for RLHF in libraries like trl.

Surrogate landscape: why clip wins in practice#

This figure is the visual punchline. The black curve is the true return $J(\theta)$ along a 1D slice — it has a peak followed by a sharp drop into a low-reward region. The orange dashed line is the unclipped IS surrogate, which keeps climbing and would lure SGD to step into the cliff. The blue line is the PPO-clipped surrogate: inside the trust region (green band) it tracks the true objective; outside, it flattens out, removing the gradient that would otherwise carry us off the cliff.

A complete PPO implementation#

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import gym
import numpy as np
import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
import torch.optim as optim
from torch.distributions import Categorical

class PPOActorCritic(nn.Module):
    """Shared trunk, separate actor and critic heads."""

    def __init__(self, state_dim: int, action_dim: int, hidden: int = 64):
        super().__init__()
        self.shared = nn.Sequential(
            nn.Linear(state_dim, hidden), nn.Tanh(),
            nn.Linear(hidden, hidden), nn.Tanh(),
        )
        self.actor = nn.Linear(hidden, action_dim)
        self.critic = nn.Linear(hidden, 1)

    def forward(self, state):
        x = self.shared(state)
        return F.softmax(self.actor(x), dim=-1), self.critic(x)

class PPO:
    def __init__(self, state_dim, action_dim, lr=3e-4, gamma=0.99,
                 lam=0.95, eps_clip=0.2, k_epochs=10, c_vf=0.5, c_ent=0.01):
        self.gamma, self.lam = gamma, lam
        self.eps_clip, self.k_epochs = eps_clip, k_epochs
        self.c_vf, self.c_ent = c_vf, c_ent
        self.policy = PPOActorCritic(state_dim, action_dim)
        self.optimizer = optim.Adam(self.policy.parameters(), lr=lr)

    def select_action(self, state):
        with torch.no_grad():
            state = torch.FloatTensor(state).unsqueeze(0)
            probs, _ = self.policy(state)
            dist = Categorical(probs)
            action = dist.sample()
            return action.item(), dist.log_prob(action).item()

    def compute_gae(self, rewards, values, dones, next_value):
        """Generalised Advantage Estimation (Schulman et al., 2016).

        lam=0  -> 1-step TD  (low variance, biased)
        lam=1  -> Monte-Carlo (unbiased, high variance)
        lam=0.95 is the universal default.
        """
        advantages = []
        gae = 0.0
        values = list(values) + [next_value]
        for t in reversed(range(len(rewards))):
            delta = rewards[t] + self.gamma * values[t + 1] * (1 - dones[t]) - values[t]
            gae = delta + self.gamma * self.lam * (1 - dones[t]) * gae
            advantages.insert(0, gae)
        return torch.FloatTensor(advantages)

    def update(self, states, actions, old_log_probs, rewards, dones, next_state):
        states = torch.FloatTensor(np.array(states))
        actions = torch.LongTensor(actions)
        old_log_probs = torch.FloatTensor(old_log_probs)

        with torch.no_grad():
            values = self.policy(states)[1].squeeze().numpy()
            next_val = self.policy(torch.FloatTensor(next_state).unsqueeze(0))[1].item()

        advantages = self.compute_gae(rewards, values, dones, next_val)
        returns = advantages + torch.FloatTensor(values)
        # Per-batch advantage normalisation -- cheap, vital for stability.
        advantages = (advantages - advantages.mean()) / (advantages.std() + 1e-8)

        for _ in range(self.k_epochs):
            probs, vals = self.policy(states)
            dist = Categorical(probs)
            log_probs = dist.log_prob(actions)
            entropy = dist.entropy().mean()
            vals = vals.squeeze()

            # Ratios in log space for numerical safety.
            ratios = torch.exp(log_probs - old_log_probs)
            surr1 = ratios * advantages
            surr2 = torch.clamp(ratios, 1 - self.eps_clip, 1 + self.eps_clip) * advantages
            policy_loss = -torch.min(surr1, surr2).mean()

            value_loss = F.mse_loss(vals, returns)
            loss = policy_loss + self.c_vf * value_loss - self.c_ent * entropy

            self.optimizer.zero_grad()
            loss.backward()
            nn.utils.clip_grad_norm_(self.policy.parameters(), 0.5)
            self.optimizer.step()

A handful of lines beyond a vanilla actor-critic, and you have an algorithm that solves CartPole in 100 episodes and learns a humanoid to walk in $\sim$ 10 million steps.

TRPO vs PPO: head to head#

PPO’s edge in practice comes from a combination of advantages, not the clip alone:

• Multiple epochs per batch squeeze more learning from the same trajectories.
• Entropy bonus keeps exploration alive without bespoke noise schedules.
• No backward-pass overhead per step — one Adam call per epoch.
• Trivially parallelisable — you can run 64 actors in parallel collecting rollouts.

The MuJoCo curves (left) and Atari bars (right) show the empirical picture published in the original PPO paper and reproduced by Engstrom et al. (2020): PPO-Clip dominates A2C across the board and edges past TRPO on most tasks while running roughly 10$\times$ faster per wall-clock second.

PPO inside RLHF#

PPO’s most consequential application is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback — the algorithm that turned GPT-3 into ChatGPT.

The three-stage pipeline#

1. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Fine-tune a pretrained LLM on high-quality human demonstrations. Output: $\pi_{\text{ref}}$ , the reference model.
2. Reward modelling. Collect human preference data of the form “response A is better than response B”. Train a reward model $R_\phi(x, y)$ via a Bradley-Terry pairwise loss.
3. PPO fine-tuning. Treat the LLM as a policy, the prompt $x$ as state, the response $y$ as action, and $R_\phi(x, y)$ as reward. Run PPO.

The RLHF objective#

Two trust regions are at work:

• The PPO clip prevents per-update collapse, exactly as in classical RL.
• The KL-to-reference penalty $\beta D_{KL}(\pi_\theta\,\|\,\pi_{\text{ref}})$ prevents long-run drift from the SFT model. Without it, PPO finds reward hacks — responses that score high under the reward model but are gibberish, hostile, or sycophantic. The KL penalty is the alignment tax that keeps generations recognisably human-written.

Why RLHF is harder than CartPole#

• Each “episode” is one generation; compute per sample is enormous (forward+backward on a 70B model).
• The reward model is also learnt, and noisy. A small clip range and a substantial KL coefficient ($\beta \in [0.01, 0.2]$ ) are usually needed.
• Action space is the entire vocabulary (~50K tokens) over hundreds of timesteps. The advantage estimator must be very low-variance — this is why PPO with GAE and a large batch is preferred to vanilla policy gradient.

Where DPO, IPO and KTO fit#

The complexity of running PPO at scale — four model copies (policy, ref, reward, value), multiple GPUs syncing — spurred a wave of direct preference learning methods:

• DPO (Rafailov et al., 2023) reparameterises the optimal RLHF policy in closed form and trains with a supervised contrastive loss — no reward model, no rollouts.
• IPO patches DPO’s tendency to overfit on confidently labelled pairs.
• KTO uses single-response signed feedback (“good”/“bad”) instead of pairs.

Where direct methods shine: simpler infra, lower variance. Where PPO still wins: when you need an actual reward signal (online learning, tool-using agents, code/math environments where a verifier provides reward), PPO remains the only general-purpose solution.

Practical tuning guide#

Hyperparameter cheat sheet#

The sensitivity plot shows three classic patterns. Clip $\varepsilon$ has a wide, flat optimum — you really do not have to tune it. Learning rate is narrower — a factor of 3 misstep costs 5-10% of return. The epochs $\times$ batch heatmap reveals an interaction: too many epochs on a small batch overfits to current data and hurts the policy’s KL budget.

Debugging checklist#

• Approximate KL between old and new policy: should hover around 0.01-0.02 per update. > 0.05 means clip is failing to constrain you — lower the LR or shrink mini-batches. (Beware the common “one-sample” KL estimator $\frac{1}{2}(\log r)^2$ ; the unbiased Schulman estimator $r - 1 - \log r$ is preferred.)
• Clip fraction: the share of samples that hit the clip boundary. 10-30% is healthy. 0% means you are not using your trust region; > 50% means you are training on the boundary.
• Entropy: should decay smoothly. A sudden drop to near-zero is premature convergence — raise the entropy coefficient.
• Explained variance of the value function: $1 - \mathrm{Var}(R - V)/\mathrm{Var}(R)$ . Should rise above 0.5 within a few hundred updates; if stuck near 0, your critic is broken.
• Advantage normalisation: do it per minibatch, not per epoch. Forgetting the per-batch normalisation is the single most common implementation bug.

Common failure modes#

Summary#

Trust-region methods rescued policy gradients from their most embarrassing failure mode — one bad step erases an hour of training. Two ideas carry the field:

• TRPO turns the policy-improvement bound of Kakade-Langford into an algorithm: optimise the surrogate, hard-constrain the KL, solve via natural gradient. Theoretically beautiful, operationally heavy.
• PPO trades the hard constraint for a clipped surrogate plus first-order optimisation. It loses the formal monotonic-improvement guarantee but gains everything that matters in practice: simple code, multi-epoch updates, parallel rollouts, and robust defaults.

The deeper engineering lesson is universal: a simple, locally-honest approximation often beats a complex, globally-correct one — especially when the “correct” method is two orders of magnitude more expensive per step. PPO’s victory mirrors Adam’s victory over second-order optimisers in deep learning.

PPO’s reach now extends well beyond classical RL. Every major aligned LLM trained in the past three years — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, the Llama-2 chat models — ran a PPO loop somewhere in its post-training pipeline. The clip is, quite literally, what keeps modern AI assistants from going feral on their reward model.

References#

• Schulman, J., Levine, S., Moritz, P., Jordan, M., & Abbeel, P. (2015). Trust Region Policy Optimization. ICML. arXiv:1502.05477 ↗
• Schulman, J., Wolski, F., Dhariwal, P., Radford, A., & Klimov, O. (2017). Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms. arXiv:1707.06347 ↗
• Schulman, J., Moritz, P., Levine, S., Jordan, M., & Abbeel, P. (2016). High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation. ICLR. arXiv:1506.02438 ↗
• Kakade, S., & Langford, J. (2002). Approximately Optimal Approximate Reinforcement Learning. ICML.
• Engstrom, L., Ilyas, A., Santurkar, S., Tsipras, D., Janoos, F., Rudolph, L., & Madry, A. (2020). Implementation Matters in Deep Policy Gradients: A Case Study on PPO and TRPO. ICLR. arXiv:2005.12729 ↗
• Ouyang, L., et al. (2022). Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback. NeurIPS. arXiv:2203.02155 ↗
• Rafailov, R., Sharma, A., Mitchell, E., Manning, C. D., Ermon, S., & Finn, C. (2023). Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model. NeurIPS. arXiv:2305.18290 ↗
• Huang, S., Dossa, R., Ye, C., Braga, J., Chakraborty, D., Mehta, K., & Araújo, J. G. (2022). The 37 Implementation Details of PPO. ICLR Blog Post. iclr-blog-track.github.io ↗