AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoning

TL;DR

AReaL introduces a fully asynchronous reinforcement learning system for large language models, significantly improving training efficiency and GPU utilization while maintaining or enhancing reasoning performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel asynchronous RL system that decouples generation from training, with system-level optimizations and a staleness-aware PPO variant for stable, efficient training.

Findings

Achieves up to 2.77× training speedup over synchronous systems.

Maintains or improves reasoning performance on benchmarks.

Enhances GPU utilization through system optimizations.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant paradigm for training large language models (LLMs), particularly for reasoning tasks. Effective RL for LLMs requires massive parallelization and poses an urgent need for efficient training systems. Most existing large-scale RL systems for LLMs are synchronous, alternating generation and training in a batch setting where rollouts in each training batch are generated by the same model. This approach stabilizes RL training but suffers from severe system-level inefficiency: generation must wait until the longest output in the batch is completed before model updates, resulting in GPU underutilization. We present AReaL, a fully asynchronous RL system that completely decouples generation from training. Rollout workers in AReaL continuously generate new outputs without waiting, while training workers update the model whenever a batch of data is collected. AReaL also incorporates a collection of system-level optimizations, leading to substantially higher GPU utilization. To stabilize RL training, AReaL balances the workload of rollout and training workers to control data staleness, and adopts a staleness-enhanced PPO variant to better handle outdated training samples. Extensive experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that AReaL achieves up to 2.77$\times$ training speedup compared to synchronous systems with the same number of GPUs and matched or improved final performance. The code of AReaL is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/AReaL/.