Adaptive Scheduling Pipeline for Multi-Instance Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2611.08864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Adaptive Scheduling Pipeline (ASP), an offline rollout scheduler for multi-instance asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) of large language models (LLMs). ASP jointly reduces three sources of rollout underutilization - padding bubbles from intra-minibatch length heterogeneity, skewness bubbles from long-tail outputs, and sorting bubbles from fluctuations in training-queue occupancy induced by length-sorted dispatch - through a single offline preprocessing pass. This enables efficient multi-instance rollout that overcomes the early scaling plateau of single-instance inference while smoothing the arrival of generated samples at the trainer. We integrate the scheduler into an asynchronous architecture that decouples rollout from training while keeping policy lag observable and bounded. Complete ASP improves end-to-end throughput by up to 3.22 times and reduces iteration time by up to 76.8% relative to MindSpeed-RL, while reducing iteration time by up to 62.5% relative to verl. Within ASP, scheduling reduces mean iteration time by 10.9%. ASP also scales more robustly with additional generation resources than these baselines and shows no visible convergence degradation in the measured bounded-lag regime. ASP has since been used in an internal telecom-domain RL post-training workflow, reducing the reported training period from more than three months to about two months and producing a domain-enhanced model for knowledge answering and tool calling.
