用可抢占的廉价显卡加速大模型强化学习,降低成本超四成。
RLBoost: Harvesting Preemptible Resources for Cost-Efficient Reinforcement Learning on LLMs
- 将滚动采样任务动态迁移到可抢占的云资源上,按需调度。
- 通过拉取式权重传输和令牌级响应管理,实现快速扩容与容错。
- 实测训练吞吐提升1.5倍以上,成本降低28%至49%,适合预算敏感的RL训练。
强化学习(RL)已成为解锁大语言模型(LLM)高级推理能力的关键。RL工作流包含资源需求迥异的采样与训练阶段:采样耗时长但可高度并行,训练则依赖紧密耦合的全连接GPU集群。现有框架分为集中式与解耦式,前者因强制共用资源导致效率低下,后者因未适配算法而造成资源闲置。可抢占资源(如公有云竞价实例或生产集群空闲容量)若能高效用于采样,可显著降本。本文提出RLBoost框架,利用采样任务无状态、可极度并行的特性,结合三种关键技术:(1)自适应采样卸载以动态调节预留集群负载;(2)基于拉取的权重传输以快速启用新可用实例;(3)基于令牌级别的响应收集与迁移,实现预占处理与持续负载均衡。大量实验表明,相比仅使用按需显卡,RLBoost将训练吞吐提升1.51倍至1.97倍,成本效率提高28%至49%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential for unlocking advanced reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). RL workflows involve interleaving rollout and training stages with fundamentally different resource requirements. Rollout typically dominates overall execution time, yet scales efficiently through multiple independent instances. In contrast, training requires tightly-coupled GPUs with full-mesh communication. Existing RL frameworks fall into two categories: co-located and disaggregated architectures. Co-located frameworks fail to address this resource tension by forcing both stages to share the same GPUs. Disaggregated architectures, without modifications of well-established RL algorithms, suffer from resource under-utilization. Meanwhile, preemptible GPU resources, i.e., spot instances on public clouds and spare capacity in production clusters, present significant cost-saving opportunities for accelerating RL workflows, if efficiently harvested for rollout. In this paper, we present RLBoost, a framework for cost-efficient RL training that harvests preemptible GPU resources. Our key insight is that rollout's stateless and embarrassingly parallel nature aligns perfectly with preemptible and often fragmented resources. To efficiently utilize these resources despite frequent and unpredictable availability changes, RLBoost adopts a hybrid architecture with three key techniques: (1) adaptive rollout offload to dynamically adjust workloads on the reserved (on-demand) cluster, (2) pull-based weight transfer that quickly provisions newly available instances, and (3) token-level response collection and migration for efficient preemption handling and continuous load balancing. Extensive experiments show RLBoost increases training throughput by 1.51x-1.97x while improving cost efficiency by 28%-49% compared to using only on-demand GPU resources.
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