Asynchronous LLM Post-Training: Group-Mass Capping and Convergence Analysis
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Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs). Previous RL pipelines for LLMs were mostly synchronous and batch-interleaved, which is inefficient for long-horizon agentic tasks.
arXiv:2607. 07508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly important for post-training large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2607. 01083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-throughput RLHF systems often decouple rollout generation from policy optimization, leading to the use of stale rollouts during learner updates.
arXiv:2608.29296v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Larger batches reduce the variance of stochastic gradients per update and are therefore often expected to accelerate training. Yet whether this stati...
The paper investigates why Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) benefits from per‑prompt normalization by examining the local curvature of the sequence‑level policy gradient. It shows that standard deviation normalization acts as an adaptive gradient, yielding a provably faster convergence rate than unnormalized REINFORCE under mild conditions, with the improvement tied to the average within‑prompt reward standard deviation. The authors also propose IS‑GRPO, an importance‑sampling variant that maintains alignment with the full gradient and offers a tighter convergence guarantee, and empirically validate these theoretical insights on GSM8K and MATH datasets at 1.5B and 7B model scales.
arXiv:2606. 03070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift.