new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

May 13

APRIL: Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning to Tame Long-tail Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone in advancing large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs). Successive generations, including GPT-o series, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-K1.5, Grok 4, and GLM-4.5, have relied on large-scale RL training to enhance reasoning and coding capabilities. To meet the community's growing RL needs, numerous RL frameworks have been proposed. However, RL training remains computationally expensive, with rollout generation accounting for more than 90% of total runtime. In addition, its efficiency is often constrained by the long-tail distribution of rollout response lengths, where a few lengthy responses stall entire batches, leaving GPUs idle and underutilized. As model and rollout sizes continue to grow, this bottleneck increasingly limits scalability. To address this challenge, we propose Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning (APRIL), which mitigates long-tail inefficiency. In the rollout phase, APRIL over-provisions rollout requests, terminates once the target number of responses is reached, and recycles incomplete responses for continuation in future steps. This strategy ensures that no rollouts are discarded while substantially reducing GPU idle time. Experiments show that APRIL improves rollout throughput by 22.5% on average (at most 44%) across commonly used RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO), accelerates convergence, and achieves 2.1% on average(at most 8%) higher final accuracy across tasks. Moreover, APRIL is both framework and hardware agnostic, already integrated into the slime RL framework, and deployable on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alike. Taken together, this work unifies system-level and algorithmic considerations in proposing APRIL, with the aim of advancing RL training efficiency and inspiring further optimizations in RL systems. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/RLsys-Foundation/APRIL

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025

Taming the Long-Tail: Efficient Reasoning RL Training with Adaptive Drafter

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities marks a significant milestone, unlocking new frontiers in complex problem-solving. However, training these reasoning models, typically using Reinforcement Learning (RL), encounters critical efficiency bottlenecks: response generation during RL training exhibits a persistent long-tail distribution, where a few very long responses dominate execution time, wasting resources and inflating costs. To address this, we propose TLT, a system that accelerates reasoning RL training losslessly by integrating adaptive speculative decoding. Applying speculative decoding in RL is challenging due to the dynamic workloads, evolving target model, and draft model training overhead. TLT overcomes these obstacles with two synergistic components: (1) Adaptive Drafter, a lightweight draft model trained continuously on idle GPUs during long-tail generation to maintain alignment with the target model at no extra cost; and (2) Adaptive Rollout Engine, which maintains a memory-efficient pool of pre-captured CUDAGraphs and adaptively select suitable SD strategies for each input batch. Evaluations demonstrate that TLT achieves over 1.7x end-to-end RL training speedup over state-of-the-art systems, preserves the model accuracy, and yields a high-quality draft model as a free byproduct suitable for efficient deployment. Code is released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/fastrl.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025 1

EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation

Recent multi-modal video generation models have achieved high visual quality, but their prohibitive latency and limited temporal stability hinder real-time deployment. Streaming inference exacerbates these issues, leading to pronounced multimodal degradation, such as spatial blurring, temporal drift, and lip desynchronization, which creates an unresolved efficiency-performance trade-off. To this end, we propose EchoTorrent, a novel schema with a fourfold design: (1) Multi-Teacher Training fine-tunes a pre-trained model on distinct preference domains to obtain specialized domain experts, which sequentially transfer domain-specific knowledge to a student model; (2) Adaptive CFG Calibration (ACC-DMD), which calibrates the audio CFG augmentation errors in DMD via a phased spatiotemporal schedule, eliminating redundant CFG computations and enabling single-pass inference per step; (3) Hybrid Long Tail Forcing, which enforces alignment exclusively on tail frames during long-horizon self-rollout training via a causal-bidirectional hybrid architecture, effectively mitigates spatiotemporal degradation in streaming mode while enhancing fidelity to reference frames; and (4) VAE Decoder Refiner through pixel-domain optimization of the VAE decoder to recover high-frequency details while circumventing latent-space ambiguities. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that EchoTorrent achieves few-pass autoregressive generation with substantially extended temporal consistency, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 14 1

Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models enhanced by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards have achieved significant performance gains by extending their chain-of-thought. However, this paradigm incurs substantial deployment costs as models often exhibit excessive verbosity on simple queries. Existing efficient reasoning methods relying on explicit length penalties often introduce optimization conflicts and leave the generative mechanisms driving overthinking largely unexamined. In this paper, we identify a phenomenon termed length shift where models increasingly generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs during training. To address this, we introduce Dynamic Outlier Truncation (DOT), a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens. This method targets only the extreme tail of response lengths within fully correct rollout groups while preserving long-horizon reasoning capabilities for complex problems. To complement this intervention and ensure stable convergence, we further incorporate auxiliary KL regularization and predictive dynamic sampling. Experimental results across multiple model scales demonstrate that our approach significantly pushes the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier outward. Notably, on the AIME-24, our method reduces inference token usage by 78% while simultaneously increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpassing state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 7

Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including intermediate reasoning steps and optional tool or environment interactions, determines the data the optimizer learns from, yet rollout design is often underreported. This survey provides an optimizer-agnostic view of rollout strategies for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs. We formalize rollout pipelines with unified notation and introduce Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR), a lifecycle taxonomy that decomposes rollout pipelines into four modular stages: Generate proposes candidate trajectories and topologies; Filter constructs intermediate signals via verifiers, judges, critics; Control allocates compute and makes continuation/branching/stopping decisions under budgets; and Replay retains and reuses artifacts across rollouts without weight updates, including self-evolving curricula that autonomously generate new training tasks. We complement GFCR with a criterion taxonomy of reliability, coverage, and cost sensitivity that characterizes rollout trade-offs. Using this framework, we synthesize methods spanning RL with verifiable rewards, process supervision, judge-based gating, guided and tree/segment rollouts, adaptive compute allocation, early-exit and partial rollouts, throughput optimization, and replay/recomposition for self-improvement. We ground the framework with case studies in math, code/SQL, multimodal reasoning, tool-using agents, and agentic skill benchmarks that evaluate skill induction, reuse, and cross-task transfer. Finally, we provide a diagnostic index that maps common rollout pathologies to GFCR modules and mitigation levers, alongside open challenges for building reproducible, compute-efficient, and trustworthy rollout pipelines.

FP4 Explore, BF16 Train: Diffusion Reinforcement Learning via Efficient Rollout Scaling

Reinforcement-Learning-based post-training has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for aligning text-to-image diffusion models with human preferences. In recent studies, increasing the rollout group size yields pronounced performance improvements, indicating substantial room for further alignment gains. However, scaling rollouts on large-scale foundational diffusion models (e.g., FLUX.1-12B) imposes a heavy computational burden. To alleviate this bottleneck, we explore the integration of FP4 quantization into Diffusion RL rollouts. Yet, we identify that naive quantized pipelines inherently introduce risks of performance degradation. To overcome this dilemma between efficiency and training integrity, we propose Sol-RL (Speed-of-light RL), a novel FP4-empowered Two-stage Reinforcement Learning framework. First, we utilize high-throughput NVFP4 rollouts to generate a massive candidate pool and extract a highly contrastive subset. Second, we regenerate these selected samples in BF16 precision and optimize the policy exclusively on them. By decoupling candidate exploration from policy optimization, Sol-RL integrates the algorithmic mechanisms of rollout scaling with the system-level throughput gains of NVFP4. This synergistic algorithm-hardware design effectively accelerates the rollout phase while reserving high-fidelity samples for optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our framework maintains the training integrity of BF16 precision pipeline while fully exploiting the throughput gains enabled by FP4 arithmetic. Extensive experiments across SANA, FLUX.1, and SD3.5-L substantiate that our approach delivers superior alignment performance across multiple metrics while accelerating training convergence by up to 4.64times, unlocking the power of massive rollout scaling at a fraction of the cost.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Apr 7 1

In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search

Since large language models have approached human-level performance on many tasks, it has become increasingly harder for researchers to find tasks that are still challenging to the models. Failure cases usually come from the long-tail distribution - data that an oracle language model could assign a probability on the lower end of its distribution. Current methodology such as prompt engineering or crowdsourcing are insufficient for creating long-tail examples because humans are constrained by cognitive bias. We propose a Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) framework for systematically generating long-tail knowledge statements. Grounded by a symbolic rule, we search for long-tail values for each variable of the rule by first prompting a LLM, then verifying the correctness of the values with a critic, and lastly pushing for the long-tail distribution with a reranker. With this framework we construct a dataset, Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), consisting of 200 symbolic rules and 50K knowledge statements spanning across four domains. Human annotations find that 84% of the statements in LINT are factually correct. In contrast, ChatGPT and GPT4 struggle with directly generating long-tail statements under the guidance of logic rules, each only getting 56% and 78% of their statements correct. Moreover, their "long-tail" generations in fact fall into the higher likelihood range, and thus are not really long-tail. Our findings suggest that LINK is effective for generating data in the long-tail distribution while enforcing quality. LINT can be useful for systematically evaluating LLMs' capabilities in the long-tail distribution. We challenge the models with a simple entailment classification task using samples from LINT. We find that ChatGPT and GPT4's capability in identifying incorrect knowledge drop by ~3% in the long-tail distribution compared to head distribution.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 13, 2023

CoReVLA: A Dual-Stage End-to-End Autonomous Driving Framework for Long-Tail Scenarios via Collect-and-Refine

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems have made notable progress, but their performance in long-tail, safety-critical scenarios remains limited. These rare cases contribute a disproportionate number of accidents. Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have strong reasoning abilities and offer a potential solution, but their effectiveness is limited by the lack of high-quality data and inefficient learning in such conditions. To address these challenges, we propose CoReVLA, a continual learning end-to-end autonomous driving framework that improves the performance in long-tail scenarios through a dual-stage process of data Collection and behavior Refinement. First, the model is jointly fine-tuned on a mixture of open-source driving QA datasets, allowing it to acquire a foundational understanding of driving scenarios. Next, CoReVLA is deployed within the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) simulation platform, where driver takeover data is collected from real-time interactions. Each takeover indicates a long-tail scenario that CoReVLA fails to handle reliably. Finally, the model is refined via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), allowing it to learn directly from human preferences and thereby avoid reward hacking caused by manually designed rewards. Extensive open-loop and closed-loop experiments demonstrate that the proposed CoReVLA model can accurately perceive driving scenarios and make appropriate decisions. On the Bench2Drive benchmark, CoReVLA achieves a Driving Score (DS) of 72.18 and a Success Rate (SR) of 50%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 7.96 DS and 15% SR under long-tail, safety-critical scenarios. Furthermore, case studies demonstrate the model's ability to continually improve its performance in similar failure-prone scenarios by leveraging past takeover experiences. All codea and preprocessed datasets are available at: https://github.com/FanGShiYuu/CoReVLA

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 19, 2025

Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts for Enhanced Trajectory-Level Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), particularly with algorithms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has proven highly effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, a critical bottleneck in current pipelines lies in the limited diversity of sampled trajectories during group rollouts. Homogeneous trajectories and their associated rewards would diminish the return signals for policy updates, thereby hindering effective policy learning. This lack of diversity stems primarily from token-level stochastic sampling, where local variations are likely to collapse into near-identical reasoning paths. To address this limitation, we propose Lookahead Tree-Based Rollouts (LATR), a novel rollout strategy designed to explicitly promotes trajectory-level diversity by enforcing branching into different candidate tokens likely to yield distinct continuations. Specifically, LATR iteratively operates in three stages: (1) branching at high-uncertainty generation steps, (2) performing lookahead simulation for each new branch, and (3) pruning branches that exhibits prolonged similarity during simulation. Compared with stochastic Sampling, LATR accelerates policy learning by 131% on average and improves final pass@1 performance by 4.2% on both GRPO and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithms across different reasoning tasks. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/starreeze/latr.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding

Test-time scaling has become a powerful way to improve large language models. However, existing methods are best suited to short, bounded outputs that can be directly compared, ranked or refined. Long-horizon coding agents violate this premise: each attempt produces an extended trajectory of actions, observations, errors, and partial progress taken by the agent. In this setting, the main challenge is no longer generating more attempts, but representing prior experience in a form that can be effectively selected from and reused. We propose a test-time scaling framework for agentic coding based on compact representations of rollout trajectories. Our framework converts each rollout into a structured summary that preserves its salient hypotheses, progress, and failure modes while discarding low-signal trace details. This representation enables two complementary forms of inference-time scaling. For parallel scaling, we introduce Recursive Tournament Voting (RTV), which recursively narrows a population of rollout summaries through small-group comparisons. For sequential scaling, we adapt Parallel-Distill-Refine (PDR) to the agentic setting by conditioning new rollouts on summaries distilled from prior attempts. Our method consistently improves the performance of frontier coding agents across SWE-Bench Verified and Terminal-Bench v2.0. For example, by using our method Claude-4.5-Opus improves from 70.9% to 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified (mini-SWE-agent) and 46.9% to 59.1% on Terminal-Bench v2.0 (Terminus 1). Our results suggest that test-time scaling for long-horizon agents is fundamentally a problem of representation, selection, and reuse.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Apr 15 2

Self-Supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts for Test-Agnostic Long-Tailed Recognition

Existing long-tailed recognition methods, aiming to train class-balanced models from long-tailed data, generally assume the models would be evaluated on the uniform test class distribution. However, practical test class distributions often violate this assumption (e.g., being either long-tailed or even inversely long-tailed), which may lead existing methods to fail in real applications. In this paper, we study a more practical yet challenging task, called test-agnostic long-tailed recognition, where the training class distribution is long-tailed while the test class distribution is agnostic and not necessarily uniform. In addition to the issue of class imbalance, this task poses another challenge: the class distribution shift between the training and test data is unknown. To tackle this task, we propose a novel approach, called Self-supervised Aggregation of Diverse Experts, which consists of two strategies: (i) a new skill-diverse expert learning strategy that trains multiple experts from a single and stationary long-tailed dataset to separately handle different class distributions; (ii) a novel test-time expert aggregation strategy that leverages self-supervision to aggregate the learned multiple experts for handling unknown test class distributions. We theoretically show that our self-supervised strategy has a provable ability to simulate test-agnostic class distributions. Promising empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both vanilla and test-agnostic long-tailed recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/Vanint/SADE-AgnosticLT.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 20, 2021

Treasure Hunt: Real-time Targeting of the Long Tail using Training-Time Markers

One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases. After training, it is hard to adapt a model to perform well on specific use cases underrepresented in the training corpus. Relying on prompt engineering or few-shot examples to maximize the output quality on a particular test case can be frustrating, as models can be highly sensitive to small changes, react in unpredicted ways or rely on a fixed system prompt for maintaining performance. In this work, we ask: "Can we optimize our training protocols to both improve controllability and performance on underrepresented use cases at inference time?" We revisit the divide between training and inference techniques to improve long-tail performance while providing users with a set of control levers the model is trained to be responsive to. We create a detailed taxonomy of data characteristics and task provenance to explicitly control generation attributes and implicitly condition generations at inference time. We fine-tune a base model to infer these markers automatically, which makes them optional at inference time. This principled and flexible approach yields pronounced improvements in performance, especially on examples from the long tail of the training distribution. While we observe an average lift of 5.7% win rates in open-ended generation quality with our markers, we see over 9.1% gains in underrepresented domains. We also observe relative lifts of up to 14.1% on underrepresented tasks like CodeRepair and absolute improvements of 35.3% on length instruction following evaluations.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025 4

LongCat-Flash-Thinking Technical Report

We present LongCat-Flash-Thinking, an efficient 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) reasoning model. Its advanced capabilities are cultivated through a meticulously crafted training process, beginning with long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data cold-start and culminating in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first employ a well-designed cold-start training strategy, which significantly enhances the reasoning potential and equips the model with specialized skills in both formal and agentic reasoning. Then, a core innovation is our domain-parallel training scheme, which decouples optimization across distinct domains (e.g., STEM, Code, Agentic) and subsequently fuses the resulting expert models into a single, nearly Pareto-optimal model. This entire process is powered by our Dynamic ORchestration for Asynchronous rollout (DORA) system, a large-scale RL framework that delivers a greater than threefold training speedup over synchronous methods on tens of thousands of accelerators. As a result, LongCat-Flash-Thinking achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on a suite of complex reasoning tasks. The model exhibits exceptional efficiency in agentic reasoning, reducing average token consumption by 64.5% (from 19, 653 to 6, 965) on AIME-25, without degrading task accuracy. We release LongCat-Flash-Thinking to promote further advances in reasoning systems and agentic AI research.

meituan-longcat LongCat
·
Sep 23, 2025

Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Model to Concept Drift in the Long-tailed Open World

Real-world data often exhibit extreme imbalances and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances, which significantly biases the model training. While it has been extensively studied in vision and language domains separately, the impact of long-tailed open worlds on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first demonstrate the susceptibility and vulnerability of vision-language models to significant biases caused by tail drift and out-of-distribution (OOD) drift during both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. To eliminate the bias from different sources, we integrate the tailed drift adaptation and OOD drift detection into a unified framework by extending the concept drift theory to multi-modal. Specifically, a T-distribution-based drift adapter is proposed to effectively mitigate the bias induced by the long-tailed problem, which also facilitates the model in distinguishing OOD data through explicit distribution modelling. Extensive experiments show significant improvements in our model's ability to adapt to tailed drift and OOD drift. Moreover, it enhances the efficiency and accuracy of image-text alignment in vision language model pre-training, particularly in the long-tail open world scenario. Furthermore, we create a set of multi-modal datasets called OpenMMlo, specifically tailored for the long-tailed open world scenario, to validate our findings. To foster the development of the multi-modal community, we have made both OpenMMlo datasets and our code publicly available at: https://github.com/Anonymous0Knight/ConceptDriftMLLMs.

  • 3 authors
·
May 22, 2024

XRPO: Pushing the limits of GRPO with Targeted Exploration and Exploitation

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as GRPO have driven recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning. While scaling the number of rollouts stabilizes training, existing approaches suffer from limited exploration on challenging prompts and leave informative feedback signals underexploited, due to context-independent rollout allocation across prompts (e.g., generating 16 rollouts per prompt) and relying heavily on sparse rewards. This paper presents XRPO(eXplore - eXploit GRPO), a unified framework that recasts policy optimization through the principled lens of rollout exploration-exploitation. To enhance exploration, XRPO introduces a mathematically grounded rollout allocator that adaptively prioritizes prompts with higher potential for uncertainty reduction. It further addresses stagnation on zero-reward prompts through an in-context seeding strategy that injects curated exemplars, steering the model into more difficult reasoning trajectories. To strengthen exploitation, XRPO develops a group-relative, novelty-aware advantage sharpening mechanism that leverages sequence likelihoods to amplify low-probability yet correct responses, thereby extending the policy's reach beyond sparse rewards. Experiments across diverse math and coding benchmarks on both reasoning and non-reasoning models demonstrate that XRPO outperforms existing advances (e.g., GRPO and GSPO) up to 4% pass@1 and 6% cons@32, while accelerating training convergence by up to 2.7X.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

The Edge-of-Reach Problem in Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning aims to train agents from pre-collected datasets. However, this comes with the added challenge of estimating the value of behaviors not covered in the dataset. Model-based methods offer a potential solution by training an approximate dynamics model, which then allows collection of additional synthetic data via rollouts in this model. The prevailing theory treats this approach as online RL in an approximate dynamics model, and any remaining performance gap is therefore understood as being due to dynamics model errors. In this paper, we analyze this assumption and investigate how popular algorithms perform as the learned dynamics model is improved. In contrast to both intuition and theory, if the learned dynamics model is replaced by the true error-free dynamics, existing model-based methods completely fail. This reveals a key oversight: The theoretical foundations assume sampling of full horizon rollouts in the learned dynamics model; however, in practice, the number of model-rollout steps is aggressively reduced to prevent accumulating errors. We show that this truncation of rollouts results in a set of edge-of-reach states at which we are effectively ``bootstrapping from the void.'' This triggers pathological value overestimation and complete performance collapse. We term this the edge-of-reach problem. Based on this new insight, we fill important gaps in existing theory, and reveal how prior model-based methods are primarily addressing the edge-of-reach problem, rather than model-inaccuracy as claimed. Finally, we propose Reach-Aware Value Learning (RAVL), a simple and robust method that directly addresses the edge-of-reach problem and hence - unlike existing methods - does not fail as the dynamics model is improved. Code open-sourced at: github.com/anyasims/edge-of-reach.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

ECHO: Entropy-Confidence Hybrid Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Test-time reinforcement learning generates multiple candidate answers via repeated rollouts and performs online updates using pseudo-labels constructed by majority voting. To reduce overhead and improve exploration, prior work introduces tree structured rollouts, which share reasoning prefixes and branch at key nodes to improve sampling efficiency. However, this paradigm still faces two challenges: (1) high entropy branching can trigger rollout collapse, where the branching budget concentrates on a few trajectories with consecutive high-entropy segments, rapidly reducing the number of effective branches; (2) early pseudo-labels are noisy and biased, which can induce self-reinforcing overfitting, causing the policy to sharpen prematurely and suppress exploration. To address these issues, we propose Entropy Confidence Hybrid Group Relative Policy Optimization (ECHO). During rollout, ECHO jointly leverages local entropy and group level confidence to adaptively control branch width, and further introduces online confidence-based pruning to terminate persistently low confidence branches, avoiding high entropy traps and mitigating collapse. During policy updates, ECHO employs confidence adaptive clipping and an entropy confidence hybrid advantage shaping approach to enhance training robustness and mitigate early stage bias. Experiments demonstrate that ECHO achieves consistent gains on multiple mathematical and visual reasoning benchmarks, and generalizes more effectively under a limited rollout budget.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1

Stable Asynchrony: Variance-Controlled Off-Policy RL for LLMs

Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become increasingly central to scaling LLM post-training, delivering major throughput gains by decoupling rollout generation from policy updates. However, widely used policy-gradient objectives such as REINFORCE and GRPO suffer under high asynchrony: stale rollouts produce heavy-tailed importance weights, so a small number of trajectories dominate updates and the policy-gradient estimator becomes markedly higher variance. Through systematic analysis on math, reasoning, and tool-use benchmarks, we find that this increasing variance is reliably predicted by collapsing effective sample size (ESS), which prior stabilization methods largely fail to address. Motivated by this diagnosis, we introduce Variance Controlled Policy Optimization (VCPO), a method that (i) dynamically scales the learning rate with ESS to dampen unreliable updates and (ii) applies a closed-form minimum-variance baseline for off-policy settings, without a critic model and adding minimal overhead. Empirically, across math and general reasoning benchmarks, this enables robustly stable asynchronous training compared to previous stabilization and algorithmic methods, even in highly off-policy regimes (128 steps off-policy). In a long-horizon, tool-use task, VCPO matches synchronous performance while delivering a 2.5times speedup in training time. Code is available at: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/vcpo

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19

Long-Horizon Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning Without Conservatism

Popular offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely on conservatism, either by penalizing out-of-dataset actions or by restricting rollout horizons. In this work, we question the universality of this principle and instead revisit a complementary one: a Bayesian perspective. Rather than enforcing conservatism, the Bayesian approach tackles epistemic uncertainty in offline data by modeling a posterior distribution over plausible world models and training a history-dependent agent to maximize expected rewards, enabling test-time generalization. We first illustrate, in a bandit setting, that Bayesianism excels on low-quality datasets where conservatism fails. We then scale this principle to realistic tasks and show that long-horizon planning is critical for reducing value overestimation once conservatism is removed. To make this feasible, we introduce key design choices for performing and learning from long-horizon rollouts while controlling compounding errors. These yield our algorithm, NEUBAY, grounded in the neutral Bayesian principle. On D4RL and NeoRL benchmarks, NEUBAY generally matches or surpasses leading conservative algorithms, achieving new state-of-the-art on 7 datasets. Notably, it succeeds with rollout horizons of several hundred steps, contrary to dominant practice. Finally, we characterize datasets by quality and coverage, showing when NEUBAY is preferable to conservative methods. Together, we argue NEUBAY lays the foundation for a new practical direction in offline and model-based RL.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

FedLoGe: Joint Local and Generic Federated Learning under Long-tailed Data

Federated Long-Tailed Learning (Fed-LT), a paradigm wherein data collected from decentralized local clients manifests a globally prevalent long-tailed distribution, has garnered considerable attention in recent times. In the context of Fed-LT, existing works have predominantly centered on addressing the data imbalance issue to enhance the efficacy of the generic global model while neglecting the performance at the local level. In contrast, conventional Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) techniques are primarily devised to optimize personalized local models under the presumption of a balanced global data distribution. This paper introduces an approach termed Federated Local and Generic Model Training in Fed-LT (FedLoGe), which enhances both local and generic model performance through the integration of representation learning and classifier alignment within a neural collapse framework. Our investigation reveals the feasibility of employing a shared backbone as a foundational framework for capturing overarching global trends, while concurrently employing individualized classifiers to encapsulate distinct refinements stemming from each client's local features. Building upon this discovery, we establish the Static Sparse Equiangular Tight Frame Classifier (SSE-C), inspired by neural collapse principles that naturally prune extraneous noisy features and foster the acquisition of potent data representations. Furthermore, leveraging insights from imbalance neural collapse's classifier norm patterns, we develop Global and Local Adaptive Feature Realignment (GLA-FR) via an auxiliary global classifier and personalized Euclidean norm transfer to align global features with client preferences. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10/100-LT, ImageNet, and iNaturalist demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art pFL and Fed-LT approaches.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

Deep Long-Tailed Learning: A Survey

Deep long-tailed learning, one of the most challenging problems in visual recognition, aims to train well-performing deep models from a large number of images that follow a long-tailed class distribution. In the last decade, deep learning has emerged as a powerful recognition model for learning high-quality image representations and has led to remarkable breakthroughs in generic visual recognition. However, long-tailed class imbalance, a common problem in practical visual recognition tasks, often limits the practicality of deep network based recognition models in real-world applications, since they can be easily biased towards dominant classes and perform poorly on tail classes. To address this problem, a large number of studies have been conducted in recent years, making promising progress in the field of deep long-tailed learning. Considering the rapid evolution of this field, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on recent advances in deep long-tailed learning. To be specific, we group existing deep long-tailed learning studies into three main categories (i.e., class re-balancing, information augmentation and module improvement), and review these methods following this taxonomy in detail. Afterward, we empirically analyze several state-of-the-art methods by evaluating to what extent they address the issue of class imbalance via a newly proposed evaluation metric, i.e., relative accuracy. We conclude the survey by highlighting important applications of deep long-tailed learning and identifying several promising directions for future research.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2021

Depth-Breadth Synergy in RLVR: Unlocking LLM Reasoning Gains with Adaptive Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet its full potential is hindered by two under-explored dimensions: Depth-the hardest problem a model can sample; Breadth-the number of instances consumed in a single iteration. We dissect the popular GRPO algorithm and reveal a systematic bias: the cumulative-advantage disproportionately weights samples with medium accuracy, while down-weighting the low-accuracy instances that are crucial for pushing reasoning boundaries. To rectify the depth neglect, we introduce Difficulty Adaptive Rollout Sampling (DARS), which re-weights hard problems through targeted multi-stage rollouts, thereby increasing the number of positive rollouts for hard problems. Empirically, naively enlarging rollout size only accelerates convergence and even hurts Pass@K. Our DARS, in contrast, delivers consistent Pass@K gains without extra inference cost at convergence. Just as we adaptively expanded the depth of exploration, we now ask whether aggressively scaling the breadth of training data can further amplify reasoning gains. To this end, we intensely scale batch size and replace PPO's mini-batch iterations with full-batch updates over multiple epochs. Increasing breadth significantly enhances Pass@1 performance. Large-breadth training sustains high token-level entropy, indicating continued exploration and reduced gradient noise. We further present DARS-B, which augments DARS with large breadth, and demonstrate simultaneous gains in Pass@K and Pass@1. The results confirm that breadth and adaptive exploration across depth operate as orthogonal dimensions in RLVR, which are key to unleashing the reasoning power of RLVR.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

BranchGRPO: Stable and Efficient GRPO with Structured Branching in Diffusion Models

Recent progress in aligning image and video generative models with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has improved human preference alignment, but existing variants remain inefficient due to sequential rollouts and large numbers of sampling steps, unreliable credit assignment: sparse terminal rewards are uniformly propagated across timesteps, failing to capture the varying criticality of decisions during denoising. In this paper, we present BranchGRPO, a method that restructures the rollout process into a branching tree, where shared prefixes amortize computation and pruning removes low-value paths and redundant depths. BranchGRPO introduces three contributions: (1) a branching scheme that amortizes rollout cost through shared prefixes while preserving exploration diversity; (2) a reward fusion and depth-wise advantage estimator that transforms sparse terminal rewards into dense step-level signals; and (3) pruning strategies that cut gradient computation but leave forward rollouts and exploration unaffected. On HPDv2.1 image alignment, BranchGRPO improves alignment scores by up to 16\% over DanceGRPO, while reducing per-iteration training time by nearly 55\%. A hybrid variant, BranchGRPO-Mix, further accelerates training to 4.7x faster than DanceGRPO without degrading alignment. On WanX video generation, it further achieves higher Video-Align scores with sharper and temporally consistent frames compared to DanceGRPO. Codes are available at https://fredreic1849.github.io/BranchGRPO-Webpage/{BranchGRPO}.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 7, 2025

Category-Aware Semantic Caching for Heterogeneous LLM Workloads

LLM serving systems process heterogeneous query workloads where different categories exhibit different characteristics. Code queries cluster densely in embedding space while conversational queries distribute sparsely. Content staleness varies from minutes (stock data) to months (code patterns). Query repetition patterns range from power-law (code) to uniform (conversation), producing long tail cache hit rate distributions: high-repetition categories achieve 40-60% hit rates while low-repetition or volatile categories achieve 5-15% hit rates. Vector databases must exclude the long tail because remote search costs (30ms) require 15--20% hit rates to break even, leaving 20-30% of production traffic uncached. Uniform cache policies compound this problem: fixed thresholds cause false positives in dense spaces and miss valid paraphrases in sparse spaces; fixed TTLs waste memory or serve stale data. This paper presents category-aware semantic caching where similarity thresholds, TTLs, and quotas vary by query category. We present a hybrid architecture separating in-memory HNSW search from external document storage, reducing miss cost from 30ms to 2ms. This reduction makes low-hit-rate categories economically viable (break-even at 3-5% versus 15-20%), enabling cache coverage across the entire workload distribution. Adaptive load-based policies extend this framework to respond to downstream model load, dynamically adjusting thresholds and TTLs to reduce traffic to overloaded models by 9-17% in theoretical projections.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025

Recycling Failures: Salvaging Exploration in RLVR via Fine-Grained Off-Policy Guidance

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models. However, standard outcome-based supervision suffers from a critical limitation that penalizes trajectories that are largely correct but fail due to several missteps as heavily as completely erroneous ones. This coarse feedback signal causes the model to discard valuable largely correct rollouts, leading to a degradation in rollout diversity that prematurely narrows the exploration space. Process Reward Models have demonstrated efficacy in providing reliable step-wise verification for test-time scaling, naively integrating these signals into RLVR as dense rewards proves ineffective.Prior methods attempt to introduce off-policy guided whole-trajectory replacement that often outside the policy model's distribution, but still fail to utilize the largely correct rollouts generated by the model itself and thus do not effectively mitigate the narrowing of the exploration space. To address these issues, we propose SCOPE (Step-wise Correction for On-Policy Exploration), a novel framework that utilizes Process Reward Models to pinpoint the first erroneous step in suboptimal rollouts and applies fine-grained, step-wise off-policy rectification. By applying precise refinement on partially correct rollout, our method effectively salvages partially correct trajectories and increases diversity score by 13.5%, thereby sustaining a broad exploration space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results, achieving an average accuracy of 46.6% on math reasoning and exhibiting robust generalization with 53.4% accuracy on out-of-distribution reasoning tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 27

LLM Output Drift: Cross-Provider Validation & Mitigation for Financial Workflows

Financial institutions deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) for reconciliations, regulatory reporting, and client communications, but nondeterministic outputs (output drift) undermine auditability and trust. We quantify drift across five model architectures (7B-120B parameters) on regulated financial tasks, revealing a stark inverse relationship: smaller models (Granite-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B) achieve 100% output consistency at T=0.0, while GPT-OSS-120B exhibits only 12.5% consistency (95% CI: 3.5-36.0%) regardless of configuration (p<0.0001, Fisher's exact test). This finding challenges conventional assumptions that larger models are universally superior for production deployment. Our contributions include: (i) a finance-calibrated deterministic test harness combining greedy decoding (T=0.0), fixed seeds, and SEC 10-K structure-aware retrieval ordering; (ii) task-specific invariant checking for RAG, JSON, and SQL outputs using finance-calibrated materiality thresholds (plus or minus 5%) and SEC citation validation; (iii) a three-tier model classification system enabling risk-appropriate deployment decisions; and (iv) an audit-ready attestation system with dual-provider validation. We evaluated five models (Qwen2.5-7B via Ollama, Granite-3-8B via IBM watsonx.ai, Llama-3.3-70B, Mistral-Medium-2505, and GPT-OSS-120B) across three regulated financial tasks. Across 480 runs (n=16 per condition), structured tasks (SQL) remain stable even at T=0.2, while RAG tasks show drift (25-75%), revealing task-dependent sensitivity. Cross-provider validation confirms deterministic behavior transfers between local and cloud deployments. We map our framework to Financial Stability Board (FSB), Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) requirements, demonstrating practical pathways for compliance-ready AI deployments.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025

Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVR

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, methods such as GRPO and DAPO suffer from substantial computational cost, since they rely on sampling many rollouts for each prompt. Moreover, in RLVR the relative advantage is often sparse: many samples become nearly all-correct or all-incorrect, yielding low within-group reward variance and thus weak learning signals. In this paper, we introduce arrol (Accelerating RLVR via online Rollout Pruning), an online rollout pruning method that prunes rollouts during generation while explicitly steering the surviving ones more correctness-balanced to enhance learning signals. Specifically, arrol trains a lightweight quality head on-the-fly to predict the success probability of partial rollouts and uses it to make early pruning decisions. The learned quality head can further weigh candidates to improve inference accuracy during test-time scaling. To improve efficiency, we present a system design that prunes rollouts inside the inference engine and re-batches the remaining ones for log-probability computation and policy updates. Across GRPO and DAPO on Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 models (1B-8B), arrol improves average accuracy by +2.30 to +2.99 while achieving up to 1.7x training speedup, and yielding up to +8.33 additional gains in average accuracy in test-time scaling. The code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/ARRoL.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 25

Rethinking the Bias of Foundation Model under Long-tailed Distribution

Long-tailed learning has garnered increasing attention due to its practical significance. Among the various approaches, the fine-tuning paradigm has gained considerable interest with the advent of foundation models. However, most existing methods primarily focus on leveraging knowledge from these models, overlooking the inherent biases introduced by the imbalanced training data they rely on. In this paper, we examine how such imbalances from pre-training affect long-tailed downstream tasks. Specifically, we find the imbalance biases inherited in foundation models on downstream task as parameter imbalance and data imbalance. During fine-tuning, we observe that parameter imbalance plays a more critical role, while data imbalance can be mitigated using existing re-balancing strategies. Moreover, we find that parameter imbalance cannot be effectively addressed by current re-balancing techniques, such as adjusting the logits, during training, unlike data imbalance. To tackle both imbalances simultaneously, we build our method on causal learning and view the incomplete semantic factor as the confounder, which brings spurious correlations between input samples and labels. To resolve the negative effects of this, we propose a novel backdoor adjustment method that learns the true causal effect between input samples and labels, rather than merely fitting the correlations in the data. Notably, we achieve an average performance increase of about 1.67% on each dataset.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

One-Token Rollout: Guiding Supervised Fine-Tuning of LLMs with Policy Gradient

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity stems not just from the loss function, but from a more fundamental difference: SFT learns from a fixed, pre-collected dataset, whereas RL utilizes on-policy data sampled from the current policy. Building on this hypothesis, we introduce one-token rollout (OTR), a novel fine-tuning algorithm that guides SFT with the policy gradient method. OTR reframes the autoregressive learning process by treating each token generation as a single-step reinforcement learning trajectory. At each step, it performs a Monte Carlo ``rollout'' by sampling multiple candidate tokens from the current policy's distribution. The ground-truth token from the supervised data is then used to provide a reward signal to these samples. Guided by policy gradient, our algorithm repurposes static, off-policy supervised data into a dynamic, on-policy signal at the token level, capturing the generalization benefits of on-policy learning while bypassing the costly overhead of full sentence generation. Through extensive experiments on a diverse suite of challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general domain reasoning, we demonstrate that OTR consistently outperforms standard SFT. Our findings establish OTR as a powerful and practical alternative for fine-tuning LLMs and provide compelling evidence that the on-policy nature of data is a critical driver of generalization, offering a promising new direction for fine-tuning LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025 4

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rollouts per example to hundreds to exhaustively Broaden exploration, which yields continuous performance gains beyond the saturation point observed in ProRL when scaling the number of training steps. Our approach is motivated by a mass balance equation analysis allowing us to characterize the rate of change in probability mass for correct and incorrect tokens during the reinforcement process. We show that under a one-step RL assumption, sampled rollout tokens always contribute to correct-mass expansion, while unsampled tokens outside rollouts may lead to gains or losses depending on their distribution and the net reward balance. Importantly, as the number of rollouts per example N increases, the effect of unsampled terms diminishes, ensuring overall correct-mass expansion. To validate our theoretical analysis, we conduct simulations under more relaxed conditions and find that a sufficiently large rollout size N-corresponding to ample exploration-guarantees an increase in the probability mass of all correct tokens. Empirically, BroRL revives models saturated after 3K ProRL training steps and demonstrates robust, continuous improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results for the 1.5B model across diverse benchmarks.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

CardRewriter: Leveraging Knowledge Cards for Long-Tail Query Rewriting on Short-Video Platforms

Short-video platforms have rapidly become a new generation of information retrieval systems, where users formulate queries to access desired videos. However, user queries, especially long-tail ones, often suffer from spelling errors, incomplete phrasing, and ambiguous intent, resulting in mismatches between user expectations and retrieved results. While large language models (LLMs) have shown success in long-tail query rewriting within e-commerce, they struggle on short-video platforms, where proprietary content such as short videos, live streams, micro dramas, and user social networks falls outside their training distribution. To address this challenge, we introduce CardRewriter, an LLM-based framework that incorporates domain-specific knowledge to enhance long-tail query rewriting. For each query, our method aggregates multi-source knowledge relevant to the query and summarizes it into an informative and query-relevant knowledge card. This card then guides the LLM to better capture user intent and produce more effective query rewrites. We optimize CardRewriter using a two-stage training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning followed by group relative policy optimization, with a tailored reward system balancing query relevance and retrieval effectiveness. Offline experiments show that CardRewriter substantially improves rewriting quality for queries targeting proprietary content. Online A/B testing further confirms significant gains in long-view rate (LVR) and click-through rate (CTR), along with a notable reduction in initiative query reformulation rate (IQRR). Since September 2025, CardRewriter has been deployed on Kuaishou, one of China's largest short-video platforms, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 11, 2025

ARIS: Autonomous Research via Adversarial Multi-Agent Collaboration

This report describes ARIS (Auto-Research-in-sleep), an open-source research harness for autonomous research, including its architecture, assurance mechanisms, and early deployment experience. The performance of agent systems built on LLMs depends on both the model weights and the harness around them, which governs what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. For long-horizon research workflows, the central failure mode is not a visible breakdown but a plausible unsupported success: a long-running agent can produce claims whose evidential support is incomplete, misreported, or silently inherited from the executor's framing. Therefore, we present ARIS as a research harness that coordinates machine-learning research workflows through cross-model adversarial collaboration as a default configuration: an executor model drives forward progress while a reviewer from a different model family is recommended to critique intermediate artifacts and request revisions. ARIS has three architectural layers. The execution layer provides more than 65 reusable Markdown-defined skills, model integrations via MCP, a persistent research wiki for iterative reuse of prior findings, and deterministic figure generation. The orchestration layer coordinates five end-to-end workflows with adjustable effort settings and configurable routing to reviewer models. The assurance layer includes a three-stage process for checking whether experimental claims are supported by evidence: integrity verification, result-to-claim mapping, and claim auditing that cross-checks manuscript statements against the claim ledger and raw evidence, as well as a five-pass scientific-editing pipeline, mathematical-proof checks, and visual inspection of the rendered PDF. A prototype self-improvement loop records research traces and proposes harness improvements that are adopted only after reviewer approval.

Trustworthy Long-Tailed Classification

Classification on long-tailed distributed data is a challenging problem, which suffers from serious class-imbalance and accordingly unpromising performance especially on tail classes. Recently, the ensembling based methods achieve the state-of-the-art performance and show great potential. However, there are two limitations for current methods. First, their predictions are not trustworthy for failure-sensitive applications. This is especially harmful for the tail classes where the wrong predictions is basically frequent. Second, they assign unified numbers of experts to all samples, which is redundant for easy samples with excessive computational cost. To address these issues, we propose a Trustworthy Long-tailed Classification (TLC) method to jointly conduct classification and uncertainty estimation to identify hard samples in a multi-expert framework. Our TLC obtains the evidence-based uncertainty (EvU) and evidence for each expert, and then combines these uncertainties and evidences under the Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory (DST). Moreover, we propose a dynamic expert engagement to reduce the number of engaged experts for easy samples and achieve efficiency while maintaining promising performances. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the tasks of classification, tail detection, OOD detection and failure prediction. The experimental results show that the proposed TLC outperforms existing methods and is trustworthy with reliable uncertainty.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 17, 2021

UloRL:An Ultra-Long Output Reinforcement Learning Approach for Advancing Large Language Models' Reasoning Abilities

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the potential of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to enhance reasoning capabilities through extended output sequences. However, traditional RL frameworks face inefficiencies when handling ultra-long outputs due to long-tail sequence distributions and entropy collapse during training. To address these challenges, we propose an Ultra-Long Output Reinforcement Learning (UloRL) approach for advancing large language models' reasoning abilities. Specifically, we divide ultra long output decoding into short segments, enabling efficient training by mitigating delays caused by long-tail samples. Additionally, we introduce dynamic masking of well-Mastered Positive Tokens (MPTs) to prevent entropy collapse. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the Qwen3-30B-A3B model, RL with segment rollout achieved 2.06x increase in training speed, while RL training with 128k-token outputs improves the model's performance on AIME2025 from 70.9\% to 85.1\% and on BeyondAIME from 50.7\% to 61.9\%, even surpassing Qwen3-235B-A22B with remarkable gains. These findings underscore the potential of our methods to advance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with ultra-long sequence generation. We will release our code and model for further use by the community.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025 2

AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a trending paradigm for training large language models (LLMs), particularly for reasoning tasks. Effective RL for LLMs requires massive parallelization and poses an urgent need for efficient training systems. Most existing large-scale RL systems for LLMs are synchronous by alternating generation and training in a batch setting, where the rollouts in each training batch are generated by the same (or latest) model. This stabilizes RL training but suffers from severe system-level inefficiency. Generation must wait until the longest output in the batch is completed before model update, resulting in GPU underutilization. We present AReaL, a fully asynchronous RL system that completely decouples generation from training. Rollout workers in AReaL continuously generate new outputs without waiting, while training workers update the model whenever a batch of data is collected. AReaL also incorporates a collection of system-level optimizations, leading to substantially higher GPU utilization. To stabilize RL training, AReaL balances the workload of rollout and training workers to control data staleness, and adopts a staleness-enhanced PPO variant to better handle outdated training samples. Extensive experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that AReaL achieves up to 2.57times training speedup compared to the best synchronous systems with the same number of GPUs and matched or even improved final performance. The code of AReaL is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/AReaL/.

  • 13 authors
·
May 30, 2025 2

DRPO: Efficient Reasoning via Decoupled Reward Policy Optimization

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long and redundant reasoning even for simple questions, which substantially increases computational cost and response latency. While existing methods incorporate length rewards to GRPO to promote concise reasoning, they incur significant performance degradation. We identify the root cause: when rewards for correct but long rollouts are penalized, GRPO's group-relative advantage function can assign them negative advantages, actively discouraging valid reasoning. To overcome this, we propose Decoupled Reward Policy Optimization (DRPO), a novel framework that decouples the length-based learning signal of correct rollouts from incorrect ones. DRPO ensures that reward signals for correct rollouts are normalized solely within the positive group, shielding them from interference by negative samples. The DRPO's objective is grounded in integrating an optimized positive data distribution, which maximizes length-based rewards under a KL regularization, into a discriminative objective. We derive a closed-form solution for this distribution, enabling efficient computation of the objective and its gradients using only on-policy data and importance weighting. Of independent interest, this formulation is general and can incorporate other preference rewards of positive data beyond length. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate DRPO's significant superiority over six efficient reasoning baselines. Notably, with a 1.5B model, our method achieves 77\% length reduction with only 1.1\% performance loss on simple questions like GSM8k dataset, while the follow-up baseline sacrifices 4.3\% for 68\% length reduction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

CoNo: Consistency Noise Injection for Tuning-free Long Video Diffusion

Tuning-free long video diffusion has been proposed to generate extended-duration videos with enriched content by reusing the knowledge from pre-trained short video diffusion model without retraining. However, most works overlook the fine-grained long-term video consistency modeling, resulting in limited scene consistency (i.e., unreasonable object or background transitions), especially with multiple text inputs. To mitigate this, we propose the Consistency Noise Injection, dubbed CoNo, which introduces the "look-back" mechanism to enhance the fine-grained scene transition between different video clips, and designs the long-term consistency regularization to eliminate the content shifts when extending video contents through noise prediction. In particular, the "look-back" mechanism breaks the noise scheduling process into three essential parts, where one internal noise prediction part is injected into two video-extending parts, intending to achieve a fine-grained transition between two video clips. The long-term consistency regularization focuses on explicitly minimizing the pixel-wise distance between the predicted noises of the extended video clip and the original one, thereby preventing abrupt scene transitions. Extensive experiments have shown the effectiveness of the above strategies by performing long-video generation under both single- and multi-text prompt conditions. The project has been available in https://wxrui182.github.io/CoNo.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 7, 2024