arXiv AI By Yijing Ke, Tianle Cai, Ruosong Wang

Where Rounding Happens Matters: Rounding-Location Alignment Stabilizes LLM Reinforcement Learning

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The paper investigates how aligning rounding locations between inference and training can stabilize reinforcement learning for large language models using BF16 precision. By retaining selected intermediates in FP32 until their BF16 outputs in three key regions—RoPE, SwiGLU, and residual RMSNorm—the authors prevent training collapse across four Qwen-family models. The approach keeps the inference engine, matrix‑multiplication and attention kernels, and learning objective unchanged.

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