REINFORCE Zero: Aligned kernel allows asynchronous RL to train stably under lag 64.
NVIDIA Research and Inferact's REINFORCE Zero proposes to first align rollout with training kernel, then use unclipped token-level importance sampling to correct weight lag, achieving a training step throughput 2.40 times that of synchronous training under 16 GPUs and 12K updates.
Why it matters: The paper breaks down the gap between asynchronous RL's rollout and training into two items: weight lag and kernel inconsistency, and proposes an alignment-free, no-trimming importance sampling method after alignment.
