Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling
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Abstract (arXiv)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component in modern large language models, yet the rollout stage remains the key bottleneck in RL training pipelines. Although Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) offers a natural solution to accelerate rollouts through speculative decoding, many studies have observed that MTP acceptance rates degrade significantly during RL training, leading to limited speedup performance. To address this bottleneck, we present Bebop, a systematic study of MTP in LLM post-training, and offer practical recipes to integrate MTP into large-scale RL pipelines. First, we reveal that the MTP acceptance rate is fundamentally bounded by the fluctuation of model entropy, which demonstrates a clear negative linear relationship with the rise of entropy in the RL stage. Second, we show that probabilistic rejection sampling largely alleviates the disturbance introduced by entropy in RL compared to greedy draft sampling. We further identify that the conventional MTP training objectives (cross-entropy or KL) are suboptimal in such settings, and therefore we propose a novel end-to-end TV loss that directly optimizes multi-step rejection sampling acceptance rate, yielding ~10% acceptance rate improvements, achieving up to 95% acceptance rates and up to 25% extra inference throughput gains across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks. Third, we test various online MTP training strategies during RL and show that pre-RL MTP training with e2e TV loss and rejection sampling achieves a consistent acceptance rate and speedup throughout the entire RL, eliminating the need for costly online MTP updating. We provide extensive experiments and analysis that validate our findings. Experimental results show our method achieves up to 1.8x end-to-end acceleration in async RL training of Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6, and Qwen3.7 models.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.
Builds on
31 of 43 references.
References · 31
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- 2023Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Samplingcited by 1,006
- 2024Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Headscited by 843
19 more
- 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 835
- 2024EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertaintycited by 578
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026D-cut: Adaptive Verification Depth Pruning for Batched Speculative Decodingcited by 5
- 2026AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decodingcited by 4
- 2026Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Trainingcited by 3
- 2026TailSieve: Partial-Rollout-Guided Tail Routing for LLM Rolloutscited by 2
- 2026K-EXAONE 2.0 Technical Reportcited by 0
- 2026GrowMTP: Can RL Grow Its Own Draft Head?cited by 0
- 2026Acceptance-Aware Draft Model Training for Speculative Decodingcited by 0
- 2026Tsubame: Tree Replay for Diffusion-Based Speculative Decodingcited by 0
- 2026Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Roundscited by 0
- 2026Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Rounds7 Oct 2026
- 2026Tsubame: Tree Replay for Diffusion-Based Speculative Decoding27 Sep 2026
- 2026Acceptance-Aware Draft Model Training for Speculative Decoding21 Sep 2026
- 2026GrowMTP: Can RL Grow Its Own Draft Head?15 Sep 2026
- 2026Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Training7 Sep 2026
- 2026TailSieve: Partial-Rollout-Guided Tail Routing for LLM Rollouts24 Aug 2026
- 2026K-EXAONE 2.0 Technical Report5 Aug 2026
- 2026AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decoding28 Jul 2026
- 2026D-cut: Adaptive Verification Depth Pruning for Batched Speculative Decoding16 Jul 2026
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