Jiming Su | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

SEER: A Scalable Event-Driven Runtime for Parallel Execution of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environments

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is increasingly used in systems where many entities interact in a shared environment. In these workloads, policy inference can be batched on GPUs, but the CPU-side environment path still updates entity states, resolves local interactions, and builds observations inside each $\mathrm{env.step}$. This path can dominate latency in interaction-intensive workloads after policy batching. Existing vectorized environment interfaces and general event-driven runtimes do not directly address the fine-grained cross-entity work inside one bounded MARL step while preserving the step-level semantics expected by learning systems. We present SEER (Scalable Event-Driven Environment Runtime), a runtime for MARL environment execution under an explicit event-locality contract. SEER models each environment step as a bounded stream of timestamped events. If direct state updates are entity-local and cross-entity effects are represented as ordered future events, SEER can run independent events in parallel while preserving serial-equivalent boundary outputs. To make this contract practical, SEER uses a CAS-based dual-layer event queue: local event queues preserve per-entity causal order, while a parallel executive list exposes ready work to global worker threads. SEER further uses STPA, a preflight-guided thread-pool selection mechanism that combines short runtime traces with static workload and hardware features. We evaluate SEER on two parameterized MARL workloads: compute-intensive UAV swarm control (Aircraft) and communication-intensive wireless management (PCS). On Aircraft, SEER reduces inference latency by 16.2\% over the baseline. On PCS, SEER reduces environment-execution latency by 46.9\%, 19.5\%, and 64.9\% over ROSS-T, NBSE, and ROOT-Sim, respectively.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Hybrid-Adaptive Thread Tuning to Mitigate Simulation Execution Bottlenecks in High-Performance Reinforcement Learning Inference

In simulation-in-the-loop decision-making systems, reinforcement learning (RL) inference is often constrained by simulator-side execution overhead, where workloads are highly dynamic and sensitive to runtime thread configurations. Existing multithreaded strategies struggle to match thread resources before or during execution, causing resource contention, scheduling overhead, and reduced throughput. Through empirical analysis, we identify the ratio of task execution time to scheduling time as the key factor determining the optimal thread count. Building on this insight, we propose AutoThread, a hybrid adaptive thread-tuning method for mitigating simulation bottlenecks in RL inference. AutoThread employs a Physics-Informed Neural Operator (PINO) as a thread-count predictor and incorporates a finite-source M/M/1 queueing model to constrain and guide prediction, enabling fast and accurate estimation under dynamic workloads. It further performs load-aware online fine-tuning to compensate for prediction errors and refine resource allocation. Experiments show that AutoThread improves average speedup by 18.4\% over static strategies, achieves average throughput of 1.7x and 1.8x that of XGBoost and Reinforcer, respectively, and reduces execution time by up to 83.8\% compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/suchenjm/AutoThread.

cs.LG↗