arXiv subjects

Lunxi Cao

Publications and source records attributed to Lunxi Cao.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RollArt: Disaggregated Multi-Task Agentic RL Training at Scale

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) trains LLMs through multi-turn interactions with environments, producing workloads that mix compute-bound prefill, bandwidth-bound decoding, CPU-heavy environment execution, and bursty reward evaluation. Existing systems either colocate all stages on a single GPU cluster or decouple them only at a coarse granularity, overlooking hardware heterogeneity and incurring substantial synchronization overhead across stages. We present ROLLART, a system for multi-task agentic RL on disaggregated infrastructure. ROLLART maps each pipeline stage to best-fit hardware, routing prefill-heavy tasks to compute-optimized GPUs, decode-heavy tasks to bandwidth-optimized GPUs, and environments to CPU clusters. It decouples rollout at the trajectory level, allowing generation, environment interaction, and reward scoring to proceed independently, so that slow or failed environments never block the others. ROLLART offloads stateless reward computation to serverless infrastructure and overlaps rollout with training via staleness-bounded asynchronous weight synchronization. Our results demonstrate that ROLLART effectively improves training throughput and achieves 1.31--2.05 \(\times\) training time reduction compared to various RL systems. We also evaluated ROLLART by training a hundreds-of-billions-parameter MoE model for Qoder product on an Alibaba cluster with above 3,000 GPUs, demonstrating its stability and scalability.

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arXiv2026

ROSE: Rollout On Serving GPUs via Cooperative Elasticity for Agentic RL

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) is reshaping LLM post-training, but end-to-end training time is dominated by compute-intensive, multi-turn rollouts whose resource demand varies significantly across training steps. Resource-fixed systems cannot adapt to this variation, while resource-elastic approaches that provision external GPUs on demand suffer from high allocation overhead and limited availability. We observe that serving clusters leave substantial GPU compute and memory idle, and propose cooperative elasticity: sharing already-deployed serving GPUs with rollout workloads to provide on-demand elastic capacity. Realizing this is non-trivial, as it must preserve serving SLOs under bursty traffic while minimizing cross-cluster communication overhead. We present ROSE, a system that realizes cooperative elasticity for agentic RL post-training, comprising three components: (1) an SLO-safe co-serving executor that co-locates heterogeneous serving and rollout models on the same GPUs, dynamically sharing memory and compute while preserving serving SLOs; (2) a cross-cluster weight transfer engine that leverages shard-aware routing and weight sparsity for fast synchronization; and (3) an elastic rollout scheduler that dynamically routes rollouts across dedicated and opportunistic serving GPUs. Experiments across multiple model sizes and cluster scales show that ROSE improves end-to-end throughput by 1.3 - 3.3 x over resource-fixed baselines and reduces rollout time by 1.2 - 1.5 x over resource-elastic baselines, with no serving SLO violations.

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arXiv2026

Crab: A Semantics-Aware Checkpoint/Restore Runtime for Agent Sandboxes

Autonomous agents act through sandboxed containers and microVMs whose state spans filesystems, processes, and runtime artifacts. Checkpoint and restore (C/R) of this state is needed for fault tolerance, spot execution, RL rollout branching, and safe rollback-yet existing approaches fall into two extremes: application-level recovery preserves chat history but misses OS-side effects, while full per-turn checkpointing is correct but too expensive under dense co-location. The root cause is an agent-OS semantic gap: agent frameworks see tool calls but not their OS effects; the OS sees state changes but lacks turn-level context to judge recovery relevance. This gap hides massive sparsity: over 75% of agent turns produce no recovery-relevant state, so most checkpoints are unnecessary. Crab (Checkpoint-and-Restore for Agent SandBoxes) is a transparent host-side runtime that bridges this gap without modifying agents or C/R backends. An eBPF-based inspector classifies each turn's OS-visible effects to decide checkpoint granularity; a coordinator aligns checkpoints with turn boundaries and overlaps C/R with LLM wait time; and a host-scoped engine schedules checkpoint traffic across co-located sandboxes. On shell-intensive and code-repair workloads, Crab raises recovery correctness from 8% (chat-only) to 100%, cuts checkpoint traffic by up to 87%, and stays within 1.9% of fault-free execution time.

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arXiv2025

RollMux: Phase-Level Multiplexing for Disaggregated RL Post-Training

Rollout-training disaggregation is emerging as the standard architecture for Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training, where memory-bound rollout and compute-bound training are physically disaggregated onto purpose-built clusters to maximize hardware efficiency. However, the strict synchronization required by on-policy algorithms introduces severe dependency bubbles, forcing one cluster to idle while the dependent phase is running on the other. We present RollMux, a cluster scheduling framework that reclaims these bubbles through cross-cluster orchestration. RollMux is built on the insight that the structural idleness of one job can be effectively utilized by the active phase of another. To realize this, we introduce the co-execution group abstraction, which partitions the cluster into isolated locality domains. This abstraction enables a two-tier scheduling architecture: an inter-group scheduler that optimizes job placement using conservative stochastic planning, and an intra-group scheduler that orchestrates a provably optimal round-robin schedule. The group abstraction also imposes a residency constraint, ensuring that massive model states remain cached in host memory to enable "warm-star" context switching. We evaluate RollMux on a production-scale testbed with 328 H20 and 328 H800 GPUs. RollMux improves cost efficiency by 1.84x over standard disaggregation and 1.38x over state-of-the-art co-located baselines, all while achieving 100% SLO attainment.

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arXiv2025

RollPacker: Mitigating Long-Tail Rollouts for Fast, Synchronous RL Post-Training

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a pivotal post-training technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, synchronous RL post-training often suffers from significant GPU underutilization, referred to as bubbles, caused by imbalanced response lengths within rollout steps. Many RL systems attempt to alleviate this problem by relaxing synchronization, but this can compromise training accuracy. In this paper, we introduce tail batching, a novel rollout scheduling strategy for synchronous RL that systematically consolidates prompts leading to long-tail responses into a small subset of rollout steps (long rounds), while ensuring that the majority of steps (short rounds) involve only balanced, short rollouts. By excluding long responses from short rounds and rescheduling them into a few designated long rounds, tail batching effectively reduces GPU idle time during rollouts and significantly accelerates RL training without sacrificing accuracy. We present RollPacker, a system that fully harnesses the benefits of tail batching through holistic optimizations across all three RL stages: elastic parallelism adaptation for rollout, dynamic resource allocation and scheduling for reward, and stream-based training. Empirical results show that RollPacker achieves a 2.03x-2.56x end-to-end training time reduction compared to veRL and up to 2.24x speedup compared to RLHFuse for the Qwen2.5 family of LLMs on up to 128 H800 GPUs.

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arXiv2025

Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-Scale Learning: An Efficient and User-Friendly Scaling Library

We introduce ROLL, an efficient, scalable, and user-friendly library designed for Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-scale Learning. ROLL caters to three primary user groups: tech pioneers aiming for cost-effective, fault-tolerant large-scale training, developers requiring flexible control over training workflows, and researchers seeking agile experimentation. ROLL is built upon several key modules to serve these user groups effectively. First, a single-controller architecture combined with an abstraction of the parallel worker simplifies the development of the training pipeline. Second, the parallel strategy and data transfer modules enable efficient and scalable training. Third, the rollout scheduler offers fine-grained management of each sample's lifecycle during the rollout stage. Fourth, the environment worker and reward worker support rapid and flexible experimentation with agentic RL algorithms and reward designs. Finally, AutoDeviceMapping allows users to assign resources to different models flexibly across various stages.

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arXiv2025

Adaptra: Straggler-Resilient Hybrid-Parallel Training with Pipeline Adaptation

Training large Deep Neural Network (DNN) models at scale often encounters straggler issues, mostly in communications due to network congestion, RNIC/switch defects, or topological asymmetry. Under advanced pipeline parallelism, even minor communication delays can induce significant training slowdowns. This occurs because (1) slow communication disrupts the pipeline schedule, creating cascading "bubbles" in a domino effect, and (2) current GPU kernel scheduling is susceptible to head-of-line blocking, where slow communication blocks subsequent computations, further adding to these bubbles. To address these challenges, we present ADAPTRA, a straggler-resilient training system with two key optimizations. First, it optimally adapts the pipeline schedule in the presence of stragglers to absorb communication delays without inducing cascading bubbles, using a simple yet effective algorithm guided by an analytical model. Second, upon detecting slow communication, ADAPTRA offloads communication operations from GPU to host memory and utilizes CPU-side RDMA for data transfer. This eliminates head-of-line blocking as subsequent computation kernels can be scheduled immediately on GPUs. Together, these optimizations effectively reduce pipeline stalls in the presence of communication stragglers, improving the training iteration time by 1.2-3.5x in our experiments under various settings.

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