mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Breaking Entropy Bounds: Accelerating RL Training via MTP with Rejection Sampling

arXiv 2606.12370 ↗First posted 10 Jun 2026cs.LG cs.CLcited by 9

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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

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  4. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  5. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
  6. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  7. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 2,004
  8. 2019Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelismcited by 1,868
  9. 2022Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decodingcited by 1,653
  10. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  11. 2023Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Samplingcited by 1,006
  12. 2024Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Headscited by 843
19 more
  1. 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 835
  2. 2024EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertaintycited by 578
  3. 2016f-GAN: Training Generative Neural Samplers using Variational Divergence Minimizationcited by 506
  4. 2023SpecInfer: Accelerating Generative Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verificationcited by 365
  5. 2024Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Predictioncited by 360
  6. 2025EAGLE-3: Scaling up Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models via Training-Time Testcited by 331
  7. 2024LayerSkip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decodingcited by 307
  8. 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 250
  9. 2026MiMo-V2-Flash Technical Reportcited by 191
  10. 2026Beyond Benchmarks: MathArena as an Evaluation Platform for Mathematics with LLMscited by 137
  11. 2026DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decodingcited by 135
  12. 2025Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-Scale Learning: An Efficient and User-Friendly Scaling Librarycited by 101
  13. 2025Seer: Online Context Learning for Fast Synchronous LLM Reinforcement Learningcited by 25
  14. 2025ReSpec: Towards Optimizing Speculative Decoding in Reinforcement Learning Systemscited by 18
  15. 2026LK Losses: Direct Acceptance Rate Optimization for Speculative Decodingcited by 18
  16. 2026D-PACE: Dynamic Position-Aware Cross-Entropy for Parallel Speculative Draftingcited by 17
  17. 2025SpecBranch: Speculative Decoding via Hybrid Drafting and Rollback-Aware Branch Parallelismcited by 15
  18. 2026Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative Draft Modelscited by 11
  19. 2026Accelerating RL Post-Training Rollouts via System-Integrated Speculative Decodingcited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control
  2. 2026Joint Training of Multi-Token Prediction in Reinforcement Learning via Optimal Coefficient Calibration
  3. 2025Beat the long tail: Distribution-Aware Speculative Decoding for RL Training
  4. 2025Diversity or Precision? A Deep Dive into Next Token Prediction
  5. 2026Which Tokens Matter? Adaptive Token Selection for RLVR with the Relative Surprisal Index
  6. 2026Learning with a Single Rollout via Pass@k Policy Optimization
  7. 2026Sparse-RL: Breaking the Memory Wall in LLM Reinforcement Learning via Stable Sparse Rollouts
  8. 2025SPEC-RL: Accelerating On-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Speculative Rollouts