Yingbo Hao, Song Liu, Guanghua Yu, Zhaojing Zhou, Jianchen Zhu, Yi Zou
Multi-turn agent reinforcement learning (RL) relies on long closed-loop rollouts, making generation and KV-cache costs a major bottleneck. Quantized rollout reduces these costs, but its low-precision executor also serves as the behavior policy and can induce execution mismatch with the learner. Existing quantized-RL methods are designed primarily for single-turn generation. They align the learner forward with quantized rollout or correct the current-token rollout-learner ratio, without modeling the policy history that produces each agent state. Even after quantization alignment, residual rollout-learner mismatch accumulates along the state-reaching policy history, so a current action may look locally aligned despite a mismatched history. We introduce InterQ-RL (Interaction-aware Quantized Reinforcement Learning) to correct this post-alignment mismatch. It applies bounded execution-prefix correction over the state-reaching policy history, allocates correction strength across action segments by effective support under a fixed displacement budget, and requires no additional model forward pass. We evaluate dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbones from 4B to 30B on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld, with all quantized arms sharing the same rollout with 8-bit weights, activations, and KV cache (W8A8-KV8). Across four environment-backbone settings, InterQ-RL achieves the strongest quantized endpoint result, matching BF16 to within 0.7 points and exceeding it in two settings. It matches or exceeds the learning speed of alignment alone while avoiding its late performance regression.
Conditional memory layers, such as DeepSeek's Engram, attach large hashed n-gram tables to a language model, and removing them from DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash costs 36.8 PopQA points. Low-bit quantization loses long-tail facts first, and the standard remedy, giving more bits to frequently accessed rows, backfires: refining lookups by access frequency is worse than refining them at random. We trace this to the gate that scales each retrieved row. A lookup's quantization error is weighted by its gate, which is small for frequent n-grams, large for the rare n-grams of long-tail entities, and computable from a 1-bit code. GateRQ therefore stores each row as a ladder of 1-bit residual codes, keeps level 1 in GPU memory to compute the gate, and reads deeper levels only for the lookups the gate ranks highest. Without retraining, GateRQ cuts GPU table memory by 7.8x on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, which raises vLLM throughput by 11%-31% over FP8 tables, while losing about 1 PopQA point at 1.50 bits read per lookup and 0.2 points at 2.10 bits across two models.
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) is largely driven by scaling training compute through either pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training with reinforcement learning (RL). The former contributes to learning broad knowledge and skills from general data, while struggling with data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. The latter incentivizes reasoning capabilities with strong generalization, but is constrained by limited data availability due to its reliance on human annotation. To alleviate these issues, we propose Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training data (RLPT), which combines the advantages of learning from general data and RL. In particular, RLPT derives reward signals directly from general text data through a next-segment reasoning objective, rewarding the policy for correctly predicting next text segments conditioned on the prefix text. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of . For example, RLPT yields substantial improvements in continual pre-training (+4.6\%) and provides a strong foundation for post-training (+3.4\%) on Qwen3-8B-Base.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hong Huang City University of Hong Kong, Decheng Wu, Qiangqiang Hu Harbin Institute of Technology, Guanghua Yu Tencent, Jinhai Yang City University of Hong Kong, Jianchen Zhu, Xue Liu Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and McGill University, Dapeng Wu City University of Hong Kong
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices is increasingly hindered by prohibitive memory and computational requirements. While ternary quantization offers a compelling solution by reducing weights to -1, 0, +1, current implementations suffer from a fundamental misalignment with commodity hardware. Most existing methods must choose between 2-bit aligned packing, which incurs significant bit wastage, or 1.67-bit irregular packing, which degrades inference speed. To resolve this tension, we propose Sherry, a hardware-efficient ternary quantization framework. Sherry introduces a 3:4 fine-grained sparsity that achieves a regularized 1.25-bit width by packing blocks of four weights into five bits, restoring power-of-two alignment. Furthermore, we identify weight trapping issue in sparse ternary training, which leads to representational collapse. To address this, Sherry introduces Arenas, an annealing residual synapse mechanism that maintains representational diversity during training. Empirical evaluations on LLaMA-3.2 across five benchmarks demonstrate that Sherry matches state-of-the-art ternary performance while significantly reducing model size. Notably, on an Intel i7-14700HX CPU, our 1B model achieves zero accuracy loss compared to SOTA baselines while providing 25% bit savings and 10% speed up. The code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/AngelSlim.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表