Periodic Asynchrony: An On-Policy Approach for Accelerating LLM Reinforcement Learning
Abstract
A periodically asynchronous reinforcement learning framework separates inference and training deployment to improve training throughput on NPU platforms while maintaining accuracy and generalizing to GPU architectures.
Since the introduction of the GRPO algorithm, reinforcement learning~(RL) has attracted increasing attention for LLM post-training, yet training efficiency remains a critical challenge. In mainstream RL frameworks, inference and training are co-located on the same devices, and their synchronous execution prevents concurrent inference and training. In this work, we revisit the strategy of separating inference and training deployment, and propose a periodically asynchronous framework that transforms synchronous RL training into an asynchronous producer--consumer pipeline. By synchronising model weights at the beginning of each training iteration and generating all rollouts from the same policy, the proposed framework remains inherently on-policy, avoiding the off-policy bias introduced by existing asynchronous approaches without any modification to standard RL algorithms. We further introduce a unified tri-model architecture and a shared-prompt attention mechanism to support efficient asynchronous execution and reduce redundant computation. Experiments on NPU platforms show that the proposed framework achieves around 2times throughput improvement from asynchronous execution, with additional gains from system-level optimisations, substantially outperforming mainstream RL frameworks in end-to-end training throughput while maintaining comparable accuracy. Further validation on GPU platforms confirms that the proposed framework generalises effectively across hardware architectures, indicating its potential for widespread application.
Get this paper in your agent:
hf papers read 2511.18871 Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash Models citing this paper 0
No model linking this paper
Datasets citing this paper 0
No dataset linking this paper
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper
Collections including this paper 0
No Collection including this paper