HARGO: Heterogeneity-Aware Reward-Guided Optimization for RL Post-Training of LLMs on HPC Tasks
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can equip large language models (LLMs) with domain knowledge for high-performance computing (HPC) tasks such as data race detection and benchmark question answering. However, knowledge alone does not guarantee task-appropriate behavior: the same SFT model that correctly classifies 88.65\% of C/C++ data race samples produces verbose, imprecise answers to factual queries, with 65.9\% of MLPerf responses exceeding 40 characters. Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training addresses this gap by optimizing for task-specific rewards rather than token-level imitation. Yet HPC tasks exhibit extreme heterogeneity, with binary classification, factual QA, and semantic generation differing by 58x in answer length, spanning three distinct reward distributions, and showing widely varying SFT accuracy. This makes uniform-weight RL methods such as GRPO suboptimal. We propose HARGO, Heterogeneity-Aware Reward-Guided Optimization, which introduces per-response importance weighting via confidence-modulated advantage: computing a discrimination signal from group-level reward contrast and a confidence signal from reference model log-probabilities, then modulating the advantage before computing per-response weights, without requiring task-type labels. Across four HPC tasks and nine methods, HARGO achieves the best performance on all three primary metrics: WinRate 54.62\%, Data Race F1 91.30\%, and PLP Similarity 0.8558. Ablation confirms complementary contributions from both signals. HARGO establishes the best overall alignment quality among compared methods for heterogeneous HPC tasks.