English

RLinf: Flexible and Efficient Large-scale Reinforcement Learning via Macro-to-Micro Flow Transformation

Machine Learning 2025-12-30 v2 Artificial Intelligence Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated immense potential in advancing artificial general intelligence, agentic intelligence, and embodied intelligence. However, the inherent heterogeneity and dynamicity of RL workflows often lead to low hardware utilization and slow training on existing systems. In this paper, we present RLinf, a high-performance RL training system based on our key observation that the major roadblock to efficient RL training lies in system flexibility. To maximize flexibility and efficiency, RLinf is built atop a novel RL system design paradigm called macro-to-micro flow transformation (M2Flow), which automatically breaks down high-level, easy-to-compose RL workflows at both the temporal and spatial dimensions, and recomposes them into optimized execution flows. Supported by RLinf worker's adaptive communication capability, we devise context switching and elastic pipelining to realize M2Flow transformation, and a profiling-guided scheduling policy to generate optimal execution plans. Extensive evaluations on both reasoning RL and embodied RL tasks demonstrate that RLinf consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems, achieving 1.07×2.43×1.07\times-2.43\times speedup in end-to-end training throughput.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.15965,
  title  = {RLinf: Flexible and Efficient Large-scale Reinforcement Learning via Macro-to-Micro Flow Transformation},
  author = {Chao Yu and Yuanqing Wang and Zhen Guo and Hao Lin and Si Xu and Hongzhi Zang and Quanlu Zhang and Yongji Wu and Chunyang Zhu and Junhao Hu and Zixiao Huang and Mingjie Wei and Yuqing Xie and Ke Yang and Bo Dai and Zhexuan Xu and Jiakun Du and Xiangyuan Wang and Xu Fu and Letong Shi and Zhihao Liu and Kang Chen and Weilin Liu and Gang Liu and Boxun Li and Jianlei Yang and Zhi Yang and Guohao Dai and Yu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.15965},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/RLinf/RLinf

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:45:49.056Z