mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

WAR: Workload-Aware Rollouts for Synchronous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2607.17299 ↗First posted 19 Jul 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Long-horizon rollout generation has become the dominant systems bottleneck in agentic reinforcement learning (RL). As agents interact with environments over many turns, trajectories rapidly grow to tens of thousands of tokens, making synchronous RL training increasingly constrained by rollout. We propose WAR, a workload-aware rollout system that substantially accelerates synchronous agentic RL by jointly optimizing decoding and scheduling. WAR is built on a key observation: the optimal rollout optimization strategy depends on runtime load: (1) Under low load, WAR enables model-free speculative decoding with SuffixDecoding, which reuses suffix patterns from previously completed trajectories as speculative drafts for future rollouts. Unlike model-based drafters, SuffixDecoding introduces no additional draft model and avoids GPU contention with rollout generation. (2) Under high load, where saturated batched decoding leaves limited room for speculative speedup, WAR shifts the optimization focus to cache-aware scheduling. A global scheduler places requests across rollout replicas based on cache locality, trajectory progress and server load, reducing redundant KV-cache recomputation and mitigating load imbalance. By combining decoding-level suffix reuse with system-level rollout scheduling, WAR delivers robust throughput improvements across workload regimes without changing the underlying RL algorithm. WAR improves long-context agentic rollout throughput by 1.4x under low load and up to 1.6x under high load. These results show that WAR removes a major rollout bottleneck in synchronous agentic RL and provides a practical path toward scalable long-context agent training.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

Builds on

14 of 18 references.

References · 14

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  3. 2023Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Samplingcited by 975
  4. 2024Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Headscited by 821
  5. 2024EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertaintycited by 564
  6. 2024Break the Sequential Dependency of LLM Inference Using Lookahead Decodingcited by 295
  7. 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 234
  8. 2025StreamRL: Scalable, Heterogeneous, and Elastic RL for LLMs with Disaggregated Stream Generationcited by 56
  9. 2024A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challengescited by 55
  10. 2025Laminar: A Scalable Asynchronous RL Post-Training Frameworkcited by 35
  11. 2024SuffixDecoding: Extreme Speculative Decoding for Emerging AI Applicationscited by 34
  12. 2025RollPacker: Mitigating Long-Tail Rollouts for Fast, Synchronous RL Post-Trainingcited by 31
2 more
  1. 2026CONCUR: High-Throughput Agentic Batch Inference of LLM via Congestion-Based Concurrency Controlcited by 13
  2. 2025Taming the Long-Tail: Efficient Reasoning RL Training with Adaptive Draftercited by 12

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025RollArt: Disaggregated Multi-Task Agentic RL Training at Scale
  2. 2026EfficientRollout: System-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for RL Rollouts
  3. 2026Heddle: A Distributed Orchestration System for Agentic RL Rollout
  4. 2026PEARL: Adaptive Prefill-Decode Execution with Elasticity for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training
  6. 2026TideRL: Boosting Agentic RL Goodput with Readiness-Aware Scheduling
  7. 2025SPEC-RL: Accelerating On-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Speculative Rollouts
  8. 2026Scheduling Mixed RL Rollouts Beyond Prefix Locality