The paper identifies a hidden mismatch in reinforcement‑learning fine‑tuning of large language models: when training uses fp32 master weights but rollouts are served from a bf16 copy produced by round‑to‑nearest conversion, most per‑step updates are too small to affect the served weights, causing a lag of 50–150 steps. The authors propose Fair Cast, a one‑line change that exports the master weights with an unbiased rounding rule (stochastic rounding or error feedback) and computes the loss on the served copy, eliminating the lag without adding hyperparameters and incurring only a modest computational cost. Across multiple models and optimizers, Fair Cast consistently outperforms round‑to‑nearest, improves checkpoint consistency, and reveals the implicit regularization effect of the lag.
By Andrew Gao, William Gao
arXiv:2610.07043v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Low-precision execution can substantially accelerate reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models, but discrepancies between learner and sam...
By Zhen Li, Shuai Zhang, Yanggan Gu, Yiming Zhang, Yang Yu, Mingfa Feng, Congkai Xie, Shuang Yu, Junjie Lai, Hongxia Yang
arXiv:2607. 15810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rollout generation is a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models, motivating low-precision rollout acceleration such as FP8.
By Zhengyang Zhuge, Hao Yu, Xin Wang, Zheng Li, Yizhong Cao, Dayiheng Liu, Jianwei Zhang
arXiv:2607. 24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) training for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from instability due to the discrepancy between training and inference.
By Wenwu Fan, Qihong Lin, Zhijie Xia, Zhuo Zheng, Sihao Wang, Qiang Chen, Liangsheng Zhu
The paper introduces OSOL, a method for mitigating higher‑order interference in multi‑domain reinforcement learning. OSOL selects a focus domain each iteration, uses token‑level footprints from the previous checkpoint to rank rebound risk, and applies an adaptively scaled correction to the GRPO update. Experiments on Qwen3‑30B‑A3B show a 5.7% improvement over the best baseline without higher‑order differentiation.
By Zihan Lin, Xiaohan Wang, Jie Cao, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Ran He
InterQ‑RL is a new method for multi‑turn agent reinforcement learning that addresses execution mismatch caused by low‑precision quantized rollouts. It corrects the mismatch by applying bounded execution‑prefix adjustments over the policy history, allocating correction strength across action segments within a fixed displacement budget, and does so without extra model forward passes. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld with 4B‑30B backbones show that InterQ‑RL achieves the best quantized performance, matching BF16 within 0.7 points and surpassing it in two settings while maintaining or improving learning speed.
By Yingbo Hao, Song Liu, Guanghua Yu, Zhaojing Zhou, Jianchen Zhu, Yi Zou