{"id":1158608,"date":"2025-12-15T17:58:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T01:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1158608"},"modified":"2025-12-15T17:59:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T01:59:36","slug":"metrorlhf-enabling-memory-effective-training-for-on-policy-rlhf-via-adaptive-sequence-streaming","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/metrorlhf-enabling-memory-effective-training-for-on-policy-rlhf-via-adaptive-sequence-streaming\/","title":{"rendered":"MetroRLHF: Enabling Memory-Effective Training for On-Policy RLHF via Adaptive Sequence Streaming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the<br \/>\nstandard post-training technique for endowing large language models (LLMs)<br \/>\nwith helpful, harmless, and intent-consistent behavior. In practice, however, its<br \/>\nadoption is hampered by prohibitive memory consumption during the phase of<br \/>\nthe policy-model update, especially when training on long-form generation tasks.<br \/>\nIn this paper, we propose MetroRLHF, a memory-efficient, on-policy RLHF ap<br \/>\nproach that exploits the inference-time computations to reduce the training-time<br \/>\nmemory budget and to skip unnecessary work. By re-using the inference-phase<br \/>\nmaterialized K,V context, the inter-token dependencies are freely removed that<br \/>\nnormally force the entire sequence to train in parallel. Building upon fine-grained<br \/>\nsubsequence streaming, RLHF can train the productive tokens in an effective<br \/>\nmanner. This yields a training pipeline that matches the exact behavior of conven<br \/>\ntional full-sequence RLHF while using less memory and incurring no arithmetic<br \/>\nrecomputation. Experiments on the Qwen-3 models demonstrate that MetroRLHF<br \/>\nrescheduled algorithm reduces peak training memory usage to 1\/3.8 \u223c 1\/5.9, enabling<br \/>\nnot only memory-effective but also semantic-reliable fine-tuning for LLM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the standard post-training technique for endowing large language models (LLMs) with helpful, harmless, and intent-consistent behavior. In practice, however, its adoption is hampered by prohibitive memory consumption during the phase of the policy-model update, especially when training on long-form generation tasks. In this paper, we propose MetroRLHF, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Wei Cui","user_id":"38859"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Peng Cheng","user_id":"33225"}],"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"NeurIPS 2025 The First Workshop of Efficient 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