Relax: An Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning Engine for Omni-Modal Post-Training at Scale
Organizations: AI Platform, Xiaohongshu Inc · The University of Hong Kong · University of Science and Technology of China
Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has proven effective at unlocking reasoning, self-reflection, and tool-use capabilities in large language models. As models extend to omni-modal inputs and agentic multi-turn workflows, RL training systems face three interdependent challenges: heterogeneous data flows, operational robustness at scale, and the staleness -- throughput tradeoff. We present Relax (Reinforcement Engine Leveraging Agentic X-modality), an open-source RL training engine that addresses these challenges through three co-designed architectural layers. First, an omni-native architecture builds multimodal support into the full stack -- from data preprocessing and modality-aware parallelism to inference generation -- rather than retrofitting it onto a text-centric pipeline. Second, each RL role runs as an independent, fault-isolated service that can be scaled, recovered, and upgraded without global coordination. Third, service-level decoupling enables asynchronous training via the TransferQueue data bus, where a single staleness parameter smoothly interpolates among on-policy, near-on-policy, and fully asynchronous execution. Relax achieves a 1.20 end-to-end speedup over veRL on Qwen3-4B on-policy training. Its fully async mode delivers a 1.76 speedup over colocate on Qwen3-4B and a 2.00 speedup on Qwen3-Omni-30B, while all modes converge to the same reward level. Relax supports R3 (Rollout Routing Replay)~\cite{ma2025r3} for MoE models with only 1.9% overhead, compared to 32% degradation in veRL under the same configuration. It further demonstrates stable omni-modal RL convergence on Qwen3-Omni across image, text, and audio, sustaining over 2{,}000 steps on video without degradation. Relax is available at https://github.com/rednote-ai/Relax.
Figures & tables
| Metric | Relax | veRL |
|---|---|---|
| Step Time | 125.6 s | 150.5 s |
| Steps/Hour | 28.7 | 23.9 |
| Rollout Wall-Clock Cost | 0 s (fully masked) | 38.2 s (on critical path) |
| Ref LogP Extra Cost | 0 s (resource separation) | 27.3 s (sequential stage) |
| Metric | Colocate | Async On-Policy | Async Off-Policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Step Time | 225.9 s | 201.0 s | 128.6 s |
| Steps/Hour | 15.9 | 17.9 | 28.0 |
| vs Colocate Speedup | 1.00 | 1.12 | 1.76 |
| Sleep/Wakeup | 10 s/step | 0 s | 0 s |
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning studies how agents learn sequential decisions from rewards and interaction, balancing exploration, performance, safety, and adaptation.
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