SortedRL: Accelerating RL Training for LLMs through Online Length-Aware Scheduling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been a critical paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) reasoning and agentic capabilities, but its efficiency remains a major bottleneck. Existing RL systems commonly rely on asynchronous execution to overlap rollout generation with policy optimization for enhanced efficiency. However, this approach faces inherent limitations: mild policy staleness offers only limited training efficiency gains, whereas aggressive asynchrony can degrade model quality and yields diminishing efficiency gains. The dynamic nature of LLM RL and multi-turn agentic workloads further challenges RL system design, as resource demands shift over time, making static resource allocation and generation strategy inefficient. This paper presents ReFlow, a system-algorithm co-designed RL framework for efficient LLM post-training. Its key insight is that, unlike existing RL frameworks which consume each trajectory only once, experience replay of recent trajectories enables effective sample reuse, thereby amortizing the high cost of rollout generation without incurring excessive policy staleness. To fully exploit this opportunity, ReFlow adopts a decoupled and adaptive architecture with three key designs: a dual replay data cycle supports efficient experience reuse while balancing training throughput and optimization stability; an elastic resource pool enables dynamic resource placement to accommodate evolving RL workloads; an adaptive scheduler coordinates generation strategies and resource allocation to improve resource utilization and boost generation throughput. Experiments across representative single-turn reasoning and multi-turn agentic RL tasks show that ReFlow improves training throughput by up to $2.06\times$ over state-of-the-art synchronous and asynchronous RL systems, while maintaining comparable or better model performance.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its rollout phase constitutes a significant efficiency bottleneck, mainly arising from the long-tail bubbles across data parallel ranks, particularly in long-context scenarios where faster GPUs remain idle while waiting for stragglers. Existing solutions, such as partial rollout or asynchronous RL, mitigate these bubbles by compromising the algorithm's strict synchronous nature. Instead, we propose BubbleSpec, a novel framework that accelerates RL rollouts while strictly keeping the mathematical exactness. Instead of attempting to eliminate bubbles, BubbleSpec exploits them. We exploit the idle time windows of faster ranks to pre-generate rollout results for subsequent steps, serving as drafts for speculative decoding. Unlike prior speculative methods that rely on historical epoch similarity and warm-ups, BubbleSpec is agnostic to dataset size and provides immediate acceleration from the onset of training. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that BubbleSpec reduces decoding steps by 50% and increases rollout throughput by up to 1.8x. Critically, BubbleSpec is seamlessly compatible with various RL frameworks and strategies as it sustains the strict synchronous property of RL algorithms.

Improving data utilization efficiency is critical for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks where generating trajectories is expensive. However, the dominant RL methods for LLMs are largely on-policy: they update each batch of data only once, discard it, and then collect fresh samples, resulting in poor sample efficiency. In this work, we explore an alternative value-based RL framework for LLMs that naturally enables off-policy learning. We propose ReVal, a Bellman-update-based method that combines stepwise signals capturing internal consistency with trajectory-level signals derived from outcome verification. ReVal naturally supports replay-buffer-based training, allowing efficient reuse of past trajectories. Experiments on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ReVal not only converges faster but also outperforms GRPO in final performance. On DeepSeek-R1-Distill-1.5B, ReVal improves training efficiency and achieves improvement of 2.7% in AIME24 and 4.5% in out-of-domain benchmark GPQA over GRPO. These results suggest that value-based RL is a practical alternative to policy-based methods for LLM training.