aiqbench analysis
This survey addresses the critical bottleneck of rollout costs in reinforcement learning, which is essential for training reasoning-oriented large language models on complex tasks like math and coding. By categorizing existing efficiency techniques from both mechanism and bottleneck perspectives, it offers a clear roadmap for reducing training expenses while preserving data validity. The analysis highlights key opportunities for combining these methods and identifies significant gaps in current evaluation metrics that the community must address.
Rollout Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Taxonomy and Future Directions
arXiv:2609.25463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve mathematical, coding, and other multi-step tasks, but shifts a substantial portion of the training cost to rollout, where trajectories are generated for policy updates. Efficient rollout mechanisms are therefore essential to reduce this cost while maintaining the freshness, consistency, and statistical validity of training data. This survey provides a systematic taxonomy of recent research on rollout efficiency for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning, classifying existing approaches from both mechanism and bottleneck perspectives. Based on this taxonomy, we analyze how different technique families address distinct sources of rollout inefficiency, examine opportunities and potential conflicts for combining them, identify gaps in the evaluation and reporting of efficiency gains, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.
Abstract:Reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve mathematical, coding, and other multi-step tasks, but shifts a substantial portion of the training cost to rollout, where trajectories are generated for policy updates. Efficient rollout mechanisms are therefore essential to reduce this cost while maintaining the freshness, consistency, and statistical validity of training data. This survey provides a systematic taxonomy of recent research on rollout efficiency for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning, classifying existing approaches from both mechanism and bottleneck perspectives. Based on this taxonomy, we analyze how different technique families address distinct sources of rollout inefficiency, examine opportunities and potential conflicts for combining them, identify gaps in the evaluation and reporting of efficiency gains, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
arXiv:2609.25463 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.25463v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.25463 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 221 words
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