Seer: Online Context Learning for Fast Synchronous LLM Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

Seer is a novel RL system for LLMs that reduces latency and improves throughput by leveraging request similarities and introducing coordinated load balancing, scheduling, and decoding techniques.

Contribution

Seer introduces a context-aware RL system with three techniques to address performance bottlenecks in synchronous LLM reinforcement learning.

Findings

Achieves up to 2.04× throughput improvement over state-of-the-art systems.

Reduces long-tail latency by 72-94%.

Effectively balances workload and accelerates generation.

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for advancing modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing synchronous RL systems face severe performance bottlenecks. The rollout phase, which dominates end-to-end iteration time, suffers from substantial long-tail latency and poor resource utilization due to inherent workload imbalance. We present Seer, a novel context learning RL system that addresses these challenges through a key observation: requests sharing the same prompt exhibit strong similarities in output lengths and response patterns. Leveraging this insight, Seer introduces three coordinated techniques: (1) divided rollout for dynamic load balancing, (2) context-aware scheduling to mitigate long-tail request delays, and (3) adaptive grouped speculative decoding to accelerate generation. These mechanisms work in concert to markedly reduce long-tail latency and improve resource efficiency during rollout. Evaluations on production-grade RL workloads demonstrate that Seer achieves up to 2.04$\times$ end-to-end rollout throughput improvement compared to the state-of-the-art synchronous RL systems, while notably reducing long-tail latency by 72-94%.