RPEG: Training Reasoning Language Models Scalably and Cost-Effectively

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is now central to training Reasoning Language Models (RLMs), but RLM pipelines are difficult to scale and costly to run because each RL step couples multiple large models, heterogeneous stages, cross-step state, and complex asynchronous dependencies. Existing systems typically optimize only parts of this design space. We address this complexity by jointly optimizing the pipeline structure as well as its execution using a novel data-centric graph intermediate representation called RLM Pipeline Execution Graph (RPEG). RPEG exposes structural choices such as bounded asynchrony and actor-critic sharing together with execution optimizations such as stage fusion, fine-grained scheduling, and multi-dimensional model parallelism. It is coupled with a comprehensive analytical performance model for RLM training, jointly capturing compute, communication, memory, and hierarchical rack-, node-, and GPU-level effects. Across systems with up to 256 GH200 GPUs, our distributed runtime engine implementing RPEG improves performance by up to 2x over ReaL and reduces step latency by up to 2.48x over verl, while increasing hardware utilization by up to 30%. Overall, RPEG provides a graph-driven foundation for next-generation training pipelines for frontier reasoning LLMs.