MIPS: Mitigating Mode Collapse in Reinforcement Learning for Large Outcome Spaces

Abstract

Expected-reward maximization in reinforcement learning concentrates probability mass on a few outcomes, even in tasks that require many distinct, high-quality solutions, a failure known as mode collapse. Inverse Probability Scaling (IPS) counters this in group-based policy gradients such as GRPO by dividing each reward by the outcome's probability, estimated from its frequency within the sampled group. When the outcome space is large relative to the group, outcomes rarely repeat and these estimates become uninformative. Since an outcome can be constructed along many trajectories, its probability is a sum over all of them, and computing it directly is intractable. We propose Marginal IPS (MIPS), which performs marginal evaluation by combining the sampled trajectory with a learned model of the trajectories that lead to each outcome. On Hypergrids, where the exact sampling distribution is computable, MIPS stays near the reward-distribution target as the outcome space grows relative to the rollout group, while frequency-based IPS degrades. In molecular synthesis and phylogenetic inference, MIPS sustains diverse, high-quality sampling where GRPO and frequency-based IPS collapse, showing that MIPS serves as a reliable solution to mode collapse in RL.