# Webscale-RL: Automated Data Pipeline for Scaling RL Data to Pretraining Levels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Language-conditioned policies and VLAs, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 61 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Language-conditioned policies and VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/language-conditioned-policies-and-vlas/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01335/) (2024)
- [Process Reinforcement through Implicit Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01456/) (2025)
- [StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19173/) (2024)
- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11794/) (2024)
- [ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13958/) (2025)
- [CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01780/) (2022)
- [OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04178/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19197/) (2026)
- [Aletheia: What Makes RLVR For Code Verifiers Tick?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12186/) (2026)
- [Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12429/) (2025)
- [ARES: Automated Rubric Synthesis for Scalable LLM Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23454/) (2026)
- [DeReason: A Difficulty-Aware Curriculum Improves Decoupled SFT-then-RL Training for General Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11193/) (2026)
- [Diffusion-Inspired Masked Fine-Tuning for Knowledge Injection in Autoregressive LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09885/) (2025)
- [Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22631/) (2026)
- [CoScale-RL: Efficient Post-Training by Co-Scaling Data and Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14695/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success through imitation learning on vast text corpora, but this paradigm creates a training-generation gap and limits robust reasoning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a more data-efficient solution capable of bridging this gap, yet its application has been constrained by a critical data bottleneck: existing RL datasets are orders of magnitude smaller and less diverse than web-scale pre-training corpora. To address this, we introduce the Webscale-RL pipeline, a scalable data engine that systematically converts large-scale pre-training documents into millions of diverse, verifiable question-answer pairs for RL. Using this pipeline, we construct the Webscale-RL dataset, containing 1.2 million examples across more than 9 domains. Our experiments show that the model trained on this dataset significantly outperforms continual pretraining and strong data refinement baselines across a suite of benchmarks. Notably, RL training with our dataset proves substantially more efficient, achieving the performance of continual pre-training with up to 100× fewer tokens. Our work presents a viable path toward scaling RL to pre-training levels, enabling more capable and efficient language models.
