GIFT: Group-Relative Implicit Fine-Tuning Integrates GRPO with DPO and UNA

Abstract

This paper investigates whether reward matching is a viable alternative to reward maximization methods for on-policy RL of LLMs. Group-relative Implicit Fine-Tuning (GIFT) is proposed, combining GRPO-style group sampling, DPO-style implicit reward, and UNA-style MSE between implicit and explicit advantages. By applying z-score standardization, the intractable partition function $Z(x)$ in the DPO implicit reward is canceled, and the KL coefficient $β$ is eliminated from the RLHF and RLVR objective. The population minimizers of $\mathcal{L}_{\text{GIFT}}$ are characterized in closed form: they coincide exactly with the GRPO/RLHF solution family $π^{*}_β(y|x)\proptoπ_{\text{ref}}(y|x)e^{\frac{1}βr_ϕ(x,y)}$, with a prompt-dependent, variance-determined KL coefficient $β(x)=\frac{σ_ϕ(x)}{\hatσ_θ(x)}$. GIFT therefore solves the same parametric policy family as GRPO while replacing GRPO's externally tuned scalar $β$ with a prompt-adaptive $β(x)$ optimized endogenously by matching reward distributions. Empirically, on 7B-32B backbones, GIFT converges faster than GRPO, DAPO and GSPO and overfits less on RLVR (GSM8K, MATH, AIME) and produces higher length-controlled win rates on RLHF (AlpacaEval, Arena-Hard). All proofs and detailed background are deferred to the appendix.