ThunderSyncRL is a training framework that eliminates idle time in agentic reinforcement learning by starting gradient computation immediately once all necessary inputs are available, thereby avoiding policy staleness. It applies to group relative policy optimization (GRPO) by computing trajectory score gradients as soon as rewards arrive, and to on‑policy distillation (OPD) by updating gradients for completed agentic turns while tool calls execute. Experiments on SWE‑bench Verified and Terminal Bench 4.0 show that ThunderSyncRL matches synchronous training performance up to 1.9× faster and outperforms asynchronous training by up to 2.47 percentage points at a fixed budget.
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space.
By William Hoy, Binxu Wang, Xu Pan
Agentic ESOpt proposes using evolution strategies (ES) instead of reinforcement learning to fine‑tune large language‑model agents for long‑horizon tasks. ES offers model scalability, flexibility, and better long‑horizon credit assignment, enabling full‑parameter optimization with minimal GPU memory. The framework samples parameter perturbations, evaluates agents with rewards, and updates online, achieving notable performance gains on WebArena‑Lite and in test‑time prompt‑parameter co‑evolution.
By Zhi Zheng, Rongsheng Chen, Yunpeng Ba, Zhenkun Wang, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv:2609.36830v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fully asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) improves resource utilization in large language model post-training by overlapping rollout generation wi...
By Chenliang Li, Neiwen Ling, Zijun Wei, Alfredo Garcia
arXiv:2601. 18510v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents excel at general tasks, they inherently struggle with continual adaptation due to the frozen weights after deployment.
By Yibo Li, Zijie Lin, Ailin Deng, Xuan Zhang, Yufei He, Shuo Ji, Tri Cao, Bryan Hooi
arXiv:2606. 18388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics.
By Haoyang Fang, Wei Zhu, Boran Han, Alex Zhang, Zhenyu Pan, Shuo Yang, Shuai Zhang, Jiading Gai, Peng Tang, Cuixiong Hu, Xuan Zhu, Huzefa Rangwala, George Karypis, Bernie Wang