arXiv Machine Learning

Behavioral Consistency in Machine Learning

The paper investigates how identical model weights can yield different next‑token distributions when run by different serving programs, due to variations in precision, kernel implementation, and batching. It introduces the concept of kernel contracts that bound how much a serving kernel may deviate from a reference kernel on each traffic slice, and proves non‑asymptotic bounds linking logit differences to divergence metrics, reward changes, policy‑gradient bias, and greedy‑token flips. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct confirm that these bounds hold across prompts and that precision or engine changes can alter token outputs, especially on undecided prompts, highlighting the need for per‑slice contract checks.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Training-Inference Kernel Contracts: Bounding Divergence in Post-Training and Deployment

arXiv:2606. 07581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A modern post-training pipeline often writes one symbol for its policy, pi_theta, while evaluating it through two different programs: a training kernel optimized for autograd and an inference kernel optimized for low-precision, fused, dynamically batched serving.

By Bruce Changlong Xu, Lan Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

ScaleRLT: Exact Log-Probabilities and Fast Deferred Rollouts for Reinforcement Learning on Looped Transformers

ScaleRLT introduces a hybrid learner log‑probability method that reconciles differences between dense and deferred rollout computations in looped language models like Ouro. By using a stop‑gradient replay of the rollout schedule, the approach achieves bit‑for‑bit reproducibility across FP32 and bf16 real‑weight cells while maintaining the same gradient accuracy as dense implementations. The technique boosts rollout throughput by up to 1.56× on a single GPU and significantly speeds up multi‑node GRPO updates, leading to substantial accuracy gains on GSM8K in short training runs.

By Dezhen Lu, Zixiang Ni, Runguo Li
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

End-to-End MXFP8 Reinforcement Learning on Blackwell: What Matching Buys, When It Pays Off, and How It Fails

The paper presents an end‑to‑end MXFP8 reinforcement learning implementation on Blackwell GPUs, evaluating its benefits and limitations with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-30B-A3B models. It finds that matching FP8 precision between sampler and learner improves consistency, that speed gains appear only for large micro‑batches, and that several weight‑synchronization correctness conditions can fail silently. The study also introduces seven explicit checks to detect such failures during training.

By Wengee Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical: training-inference divergence governs approximation error in finite-horizon bounds, whereas PPO clipping only gates sampled outward updates, acting as a sampled surrogate rather than a full-policy constraint.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing.

By Junyao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Xiangxin Zhou, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

HeadWiseKV: Budgeted Per-Head Cache Residency for Hybrid Long-Context Language Models

HeadWiseKV is a training‑free framework that compresses the residual global key–value caches of hybrid long‑context language models by assigning each physical KV head a static, multilevel history window. It formulates cache allocation as a restricted operational rate–distortion problem and uses the SeqCalib algorithm to generate per‑head residency policies that account for interactions across layers. In evaluations on four hybrid models, HeadWiseKV preserves near‑full‑KV quality while reducing peak device memory usage by 8.59% at a 112K context length and extending the largest verified context from 114K to 161K.

By Renjie Xie, Juncheng Yang, Aoting Hu, Mingxi Zhang, Liyao Wu, Zheheng Hong, Wei Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents

arXiv:2606. 05597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary.

By Hao Bai, Rui Yang, Chenlu Ye, Spencer Whitehead, Aviral Kumar, Tong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

LongStraw: Long-Context RL Beyond 2M Tokens under a Fixed GPU Budget

arXiv:2607. 14952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing gap separates inference context lengths from RL post-training: inference systems are approaching million-token contexts, while post-training workloads often remain at 256K tokens or below and rely on length generalization at deployment.

By Changhai Zhou, Kieran Liu, Yuhua Zhou, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Harry Zhang, Irvine Lu, Nolan Ho, Lucian Li, Andrew Lei, Cleon Cheng, Steven Chiang, Yihang Zeng, Di Zhang, Rio Yang, Kaijie Chen, Andrew Chen, Pony Ma, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Deconstructing Off-Policy Ratios: Entropy-Scaled Trust Regions for Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 22186v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse.

By Guanqun Zhao, Zijun Xie, Binbin Zheng, Enlei Gong, Jiafeng Lu, Yehan Yang, Aoqi Hu, Zeyu Chen