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Abstract:LLM reinforcement learning (RL) requires frequent synchronization of large model parameters between the trainer and distributed rollout actors. High-throughput RL post-training therefore relies on dedicated RDMA HPC/cloud clusters, an infrastructure cost most organizations cannot absorb. A natural alternative is to aggregate loosely-coupled GPUs over standard Ethernet and WAN links, but this commodity connectivity cannot sustain full-weight broadcasts: synchronizing an 8B model can take over 100~seconds on bandwidth-limited links, while rollout generation typically takes tens of seconds.
Toward making RL practical in this regime, we observe that RL fine-tuning yields highly sparse per-step updates, with only around 1\% of parameter elements changing. On top of this insight, we present AuroraRL, a novel high-performance RL training system that preserves bit-exact updates without dropping or quantizing information, designed for commodity-networked, loosely-coupled GPU resources. AuroraRL represents each step as a sparse delta checkpoint, pipelines delta extraction with multi-stream transmission, overlaps transfer with rollout generation, and coordinates heterogeneous workers with throughput- and bandwidth-aware scheduling plus lease-based fault tolerance. Across Qwen3 4B--14B models deployed in up to four geographic regions, AuroraRL shrinks per-step weight transfer by 79$\times$ on Qwen3-8B, delivers 1.3--9.5$\times$ higher throughput than dense-broadcast baselines (PrimeRL-Full, async-tolerant, multi-stream variants), and brings end-to-end training within 8.91\% of an ideal RDMA single-datacenter baseline, while transparently tolerating common failures and preserving training accuracy. By leveraging on-demand, cross-cloud GPUs over commodity links, AuroraRL delivers 1.21--1.59$\times$ higher tokens per dollar than reserved RDMA clusters at comparable throughput.

Submission history

From: Geng Luo [view email]
[v1] Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:26:53 UTC (2,268 KB)
[v2] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 08:12:37 UTC (2,262 KB)