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[CS.AI] NgramRL: Accelerating RL Post-Training for Structured Generation via Rollout-Aware N-gram Speculative Decoding

Published at: 2026-10-27 22:00 Last updated: 2026-10-29 00:58
#AI #optimization #LLM

Reinforcement‑learning (RL) post‑training markedly improves the reasoning ability of large language models, yet its dominant cost stems from autoregressive rollout generation, often exceeding 70% of the total training time. Existing speculative‑decoding approaches are ill‑suited for this scenario: model‑based draft generators consume scarce GPU memory and can become misaligned as the policy evolves, while model‑free methods fail to exploit the repetition across training epochs.\ \ We observe that recent rollouts of the same prompt provide a high‑quality, self‑updating draft source. Leveraging this insight, we introduce NgramRL, a per‑prompt n‑gram drafter built from a bounded recent rollout history. NgramRL requires no auxiliary model, drafter training, or persistent GPU‑resident drafter state, and target‑model verification preserves the rollout distribution.\ \ To hide CPU cache lookup and scheduling overhead, we further propose an adaptive fan‑out prefetcher that predicts likely verification outcomes $(j, b)$, where $j$ is the accepted draft length and $b$ is the continuation token emitted by the target model. A causal budget allocator concentrates prefetches on high‑probability outcomes, while uncovered cases fall back to sequential lookup without altering committed tokens.\ \ Across two model families and three reasoning and structured‑generation workloads, NgramRL commits 3.60–7.77 tokens per target‑model forward in the warm‑cache regime, achieving up to 1.99× the throughput of SuffixDecoding and 7.0× that of prompt‑lookup decoding. On the Spider benchmark, the prefetcher covers 96.6% of Qwen3‑8B outcomes with a candidate budget of 16, improving measured rollout throughput by 1.38× over synchronous NgramRL and approaching the 1.40× overlap ceiling.\ \ Review: NgramRL exploits n‑gram statistics from recent rollouts to enable efficient speculative decoding without extra models, and its adaptive prefetcher further reduces CPU overhead, delivering substantial speed‑ups in structured generation tasks.

Original Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32881

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