Cross-Epoch Adaptive Rollout Optimization for RL Post-Training

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05606v1
• Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:27:51 GMT
• Title: Cross-Epoch Adaptive Rollout Optimization for RL Post-Training
• Abstract summary: LLM post-training often relies on reinforcement learning methods that sample multiple rollouts per prompt.<n>Most existing approaches use a fixed rollout budget for every prompt, despite large differences in the training signal different prompts provide.<n>We study adaptive rollout allocation under a fixed global budget and formulate the problem as online resource allocation with prompt-level diminishing returns.
• Score: 5.459625245330074
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: LLM post-training often relies on reinforcement learning methods that sample multiple rollouts per prompt, yet most existing approaches use a fixed rollout budget for every prompt, despite large differences in the training signal different prompts provide. In this paper, we study adaptive rollout allocation under a fixed global budget and formulate the problem as online resource allocation with prompt-level diminishing returns. Our method, CERO, maintains a Beta posterior over each prompt's success probability and uses the posterior expected Bernoulli variance as a Bayesian estimate of the value of additional rollouts. We use this estimate to construct a concave, saturating utility over cumulative allocations, yielding an objective in which decisions across prompts and epochs are coupled by the global budget. Since the resulting objective is temporally nonseparable, we derive a Fenchel-dual reformulation and update both prompt-level and budget-level dual variables via projected online gradient descent. Under fixed prompt utilities, we prove an $O(\sqrt{K})$ regret bound against the offline allocation benchmark. Experiments on mathematical-reasoning problems show that CERO consistently outperforms GRPO across multiple open-weight LLMs and benchmarks, demonstrating that adaptive rollout budgeting can improve sample efficiency.

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