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Author

Rein Houthooft

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#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Group Adaptive Clipping Policy Optimization

Group relative policy optimization for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically uses a fixed importance-sampling (IS) ratio clipping boundary across all rollouts. We identify a key limitation: rare correct rollouts on harder problems and abundant correct rollouts on easier problems are clipped at comparable rates, despite contributing very different learning signals. Rollouts with low group success exhibit larger IS ratios and carry stronger gradient signal for exploration and solving new problems, yet are disproportionately suppressed by fixed clipping. To address this, we propose Group Adaptive Clipping Policy Optimization (GAPO), a plug-in modification to GRPO methods that adapts the clipping boundary to the rollout advantage. GAPO is motivated by a reverse-KL trust-region perspective, which suggests that rollouts with larger learning signal should receive proportionally greater update headroom. GAPO requires no reward shaping and preserves the standard PPO/GSPO surrogate while adapting only the clipping threshold. Across Qwen and Llama models, GAPO consistently improves both Pass@1 and Pass@k over fixed clipping and advantage-shaping baselines on math reasoning and coding benchmarks where the pass rates by the base model are relatively low.

Sheng Jia, Xiao Wang, S. Kasiviswanathan et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

GenRec: An LLM-Backed Recommendation Ranker at Netflix

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping recommender systems by enabling richer modeling of users, content, and context directly in natural language. At Netflix, we are exploring this direction through GenRec, an LLM-backed recommendation ranker built on top of an in-house foundational LLM. GenRec follows a two-phase framework: Phase 1 adapts an open-source LLM to Netflix data, developing deep understanding of the catalog and member behavior while balancing capabilities such as content understanding and instruction following. Phase 2 post-trains this foundation model with recommendation-ranking specific data, labels, and reward signals, aiming to align the ranker with business requirements and long-term member satisfaction. This paper focuses on Phase 2 and the transition from a traditional discriminative ranker with thousands of engineered features to an LLM-backed ranker driven by verbalized user histories and context. We describe our design for input verbalization and context engineering, post-training data construction, reward integration, model architecture, and a cost-constrained serving design based on a prefill-only inference approach. We report results from a large-scale A/B test comparing GenRec against the current production ranker model, where we show that a GenRec model trained with substantially fewer Phase-2 labeled training examples and input signals can achieve statistically significant gains in offline and online metrics. We discuss how LLM-backed recommenders could shift the recommendation paradigm: from feature engineering to context engineering, and from bespoke architectures to shared foundation backbones. We also outline practical lessons for serving such systems under real-world resource constraints.

Ying Li, Shradha Sehgal, A. Rao et al. · 0 citations

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