Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly used to enhance the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in solving complex multi-turn tasks. During rollout, agentic RL exhibits a workload pattern distinct from that of traditional RL: multi-turn interactions repeatedly introduce prefill requests, causing prefill and decode workloads to coexist throughout rollout. This workload makes prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation, a design widely used for online LLM serving, promising for speeding up agentic RL rollout. This paper shows that PD disaggregation can improve rollout efficiency by (a) mitigating interference among data-parallel attention modules, (b) enabling stage-specific parallelism, and (c) reducing end-to-end trajectory completion time. However, a fixed prefill-decode allocation may fail to sustain these benefits as workload composition varies across tasks and over time. We therefore present Prorsa, an agentic RL framework for prediction-guided prefill-decode resource allocation. Prorsa observes the lifecycle of every trajectory to forecast short-horizon prefill and decode demand. These forecasts then guide worker allocation decisions and trigger role switching of rollout engines, aligning prefill and decode capacity with anticipated workload demand. Across synchronous and asynchronous agentic RL settings, Prorsa achieves end-to-end rollout speedups of 1.11x-4.05x over prefill-decode colocation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Normalized cumulative prefill and decode tokens for different RL tasks.
Figure 2
Figure 3: Prefill-to-decode token ratios across and within steps with a maximum staleness of 8.
Figure 4: Prorsa architecture overview.
Figure 5: Overall performance of Prorsa and PD colocation.
Model
Qwen3-235B
DeepSeek-V3.2
MiMo-V2.5-Pro
Staleness
On-policy
2
8
On-policy
2
8
On-policy
2
8
PD colocation
133.88
169.14
176.55
713.05
723.96
939.54
253.17
198.08
252.36
Prorsa
78.98
86.96
80.40
119.47
123.21
128.12
195.35
158.90
216.42
(1.7 ×↓ )
(1.9 ×↓ )
(2.2 ×↓ )
(6.0 ×↓ )
(5.9 ×↓ )
(7.3 ×↓ )
(1.3 ×↓ )
(1.2 ×↓ )
(1.2 ×↓ )
Table 2: Average end-to-end trajectory completion time (seconds) on the general agent task.
Figure 7Figure 8
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10: Inter-step prefill-to-decode token ratios for the general agent and coding agent tasks over seven training steps.
Figure 11: Intra-step prefill-to-decode token ratios within the first training step, measured over 10-second windows.
Multi-turn rollout dominates the cost of agentic reinforcement learning (RL). Asynchronous execution and elastic GPU resources can accelerate this stage, but adding rollout replicas yields diminishing returns while training GPUs remain idle between updates. We observe that effective resource use also depends on the prefill--decode (PD) configuration. Both the choice between colocation and disaggregation and the optimal PD ratio vary with the workload, making resource scaling and PD configuration interdependent. Exploiting this opportunity requires selecting effective configurations and realizing their benefits within transient resource-availability windows despite reconfiguration costs. We present PEARL, an asynchronous agentic RL system that coordinates external resource elasticity, temporary reuse of idle training GPUs, and adaptive PD execution. PEARL maintains a unified GPU--worker--role state and uses runtime profiles to predict rollout batch completion time, accounting for environment-induced reductions in decode concurrency. It selects the PD mode and ratio under the current GPU budget and translates each decision into an incremental transition plan that minimizes worker and role changes. Cost-aware switching and borrowing policies suppress transitions with insufficient expected benefit while ensuring timely return of training GPUs. Our evaluation show that PEARL achieves 2.17--2.79× the throughput of fixed-resource ROLL across different LLMs. Compared with RLBoost+, throughput improves by up to approximately 26.9% for Qwen3-8B and 36.3% for Qwen3-30B-A3B.
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× over state-of-the-art synchronous and asynchronous RL systems, while maintaining comparable or better model performance.
Yukun Tian, Junwei Su, Haofeng Xu +6
The University of Hong Kong · Alibaba Group · University of Science and Technology of China +1
Multi-turn LLM agents are increasingly important for solving complex, interactive tasks, and reinforcement learning (RL) is a key ingredient for improving their long-horizon behavior. However, RL training requires generating large numbers of sandboxed rollout trajectories, and existing infrastructures often couple rollout orchestration with the training loop, making systems hard to migrate and maintain. Under the rollout-as-a-service philosophy, we present ProRL Agent , a scalable infrastructure that serves the full agentic rollout lifecycle through an API service. ProRL Agent also provides standardized and extensible sandbox environments that support diverse agentic tasks in rootless HPC settings. We validate ProRL Agent through RL training on software engineering, math, STEM, and coding tasks. ProRL Agent is open-sourced and integrated as part of NVIDIA NeMo Gym.