Shaopan Xiong

Weixun Wang, XiaoXiao Xu, Wanhe An et al.

Agentic crafting requires LLMs to operate in real-world environments over multiple turns by taking actions, observing outcomes, and iteratively refining artifacts. Despite its importance, the open-source community lacks a principled, end-to-end ecosystem to streamline agent development. We introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem (ALE), a foundational infrastructure that optimizes the production pipeline for agentic model. ALE consists of three components: ROLL, a post-training framework for weight optimization; ROCK, a sandbox environment manager for trajectory generation; and iFlow CLI, an agent framework for efficient context engineering. We release ROME, an open-source agent grounded by ALE and trained on over one million trajectories. Our approach includes data composition protocols for synthesizing complex behaviors and a novel policy optimization algorithm, Interaction-Perceptive Agentic Policy Optimization (IPA), which assigns credit over semantic interaction chunks rather than individual tokens to improve long-horizon training stability. Empirically, we evaluate ROME within a structured setting and introduce Terminal Bench Pro, a benchmark with improved scale and contamination control. ROME demonstrates strong performance across benchmarks like SWE-bench Verified and Terminal Bench, proving the effectiveness of ALE.

Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Xiaoshuai Song et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in e-commerce shopping. To perform thorough, user-tailored product searches, agents should interpret personal preferences, engage in multi-turn dialogues, and ultimately retrieve and discriminate among highly similar products. However, existing research has yet to provide a unified simulation environment that consistently captures all of these aspects, and always focuses solely on evaluation benchmarks without training support. In this paper, we introduce ShopSimulator, a large-scale and challenging Chinese shopping environment. Leveraging ShopSimulator, we evaluate LLMs across diverse scenarios, finding that even the best-performing models achieve less than 40% full-success rate. Error analysis reveals that agents struggle with deep search and product selection in long trajectories, fail to balance the use of personalization cues, and to effectively engage with users. Further training exploration provides practical guidance for overcoming these weaknesses, with the combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) yielding significant performance improvements. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/ShopAgent-Team/ShopSimulator.

Wei Gao, Yuheng Zhao, Tianyuan Wu et al.

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform autonomous decision-making and long-term planning. Unlike standard LLM post-training, agentic RL workloads are highly heterogeneous, combining compute-intensive prefill phases, bandwidth-bound decoding, and stateful, CPU-heavy environment simulations. We argue that efficient agentic RL training requires disaggregated infrastructure to leverage specialized, best-fit hardware. However, naive disaggregation introduces substantial synchronization overhead and resource underutilization due to the complex dependencies between stages. We present RollArc, a distributed system designed to maximize throughput for multi-task agentic RL on disaggregated infrastructure. RollArc is built on three core principles: (1) hardware-affinity workload mapping, which routes compute-bound and bandwidth-bound tasks to bestfit GPU devices, (2) fine-grained asynchrony, which manages execution at the trajectory level to mitigate resource bubbles, and (3) statefulness-aware computation, which offloads stateless components (e.g., reward models) to serverless infrastructure for elastic scaling. Our results demonstrate that RollArc effectively improves training throughput and achieves 1.35-2.05\(\times\) end-to-end training time reduction compared to monolithic and synchronous baselines. We also evaluate RollArc by training a hundreds-of-billions-parameter MoE model for Qoder product on an Alibaba cluster with more than 3,000 GPUs, further demonstrating RollArc scalability and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/ROLL.

Dilxat Muhtar, Jiashun Liu, Wei Gao et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior experience across episodes. While augmenting agents with historical experience offers a promising remedy, existing approaches suffer from a critical weakness: the experience distilled from history is either stored statically or fail to coevolve with the improving actor, causing a progressive misalignment between the experience and the actor's evolving capability that diminishes its utility over the course of training. Inspired by complementary learning systems in neuroscience, we present Complementary RL to achieve seamless co-evolution of an experience extractor and a policy actor within the RL optimization loop. Specifically, the actor is optimized via sparse outcome-based rewards, while the experience extractor is optimized according to whether its distilled experiences demonstrably contribute to the actor's success, thereby evolving its experience management strategy in lockstep with the actor's growing capabilities. Empirically, Complementary RL outperforms outcome-based agentic RL baselines that do not learn from experience, achieving 10% performance improvement in single-task scenarios and exhibits robust scalability in multi-task settings. These results establish Complementary RL as a paradigm for efficient experience-driven agent learning.

Zihe Liu, Jiashun Liu, Yancheng He et al.

Reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning has rapidly emerged as a prominent research area, marked by a significant surge in related studies on both algorithmic innovations and practical applications. Despite this progress, several critical challenges remain, including the absence of standardized guidelines for employing RL techniques and a fragmented understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Additionally, inconsistent experimental settings, variations in training data, and differences in model initialization have led to conflicting conclusions, obscuring the key characteristics of these techniques and creating confusion among practitioners when selecting appropriate techniques. This paper systematically reviews widely adopted RL techniques through rigorous reproductions and isolated evaluations within a unified open-source framework. We analyze the internal mechanisms, applicable scenarios, and core principles of each technique through fine-grained experiments, including datasets of varying difficulty, model sizes, and architectures. Based on these insights, we present clear guidelines for selecting RL techniques tailored to specific setups, and provide a reliable roadmap for practitioners navigating the RL for the LLM domain. Finally, we reveal that a minimalist combination of two techniques can unlock the learning capability of critic-free policies using vanilla PPO loss. The results demonstrate that our simple combination consistently improves performance, surpassing strategies like GRPO and DAPO.

AMAP AI Agent Team, Yulan Hu, Xiangwen Zhang et al.

We present STAgent, an agentic large language model tailored for spatio-temporal understanding, designed to solve complex tasks such as constrained point-of-interest discovery and itinerary planning. STAgent is a specialized model capable of interacting with ten distinct tools within spatio-temporal scenarios, enabling it to explore, verify, and refine intermediate steps during complex reasoning. Notably, STAgent effectively preserves its general capabilities. We empower STAgent with these capabilities through three key contributions: (1) a stable tool environment that supports over ten domain-specific tools, enabling asynchronous rollout and training; (2) a hierarchical data curation framework that identifies high-quality data like a needle in a haystack, curating high-quality queries by retaining less than 1\% of the raw data, emphasizing both diversity and difficulty; and (3) a cascaded training recipe that starts with a seed SFT stage acting as a guardian to measure query difficulty, followed by a second SFT stage fine-tuned on queries with high certainty, and an ultimate RL stage that leverages data of low certainty. Initialized with Qwen3-30B-A3B to establish a strong SFT foundation and leverage insights into sample difficulty, STAgent yields promising performance on TravelBench while maintaining its general capabilities across a wide range of general benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed agentic model.

Zichen Liu, Anya Sims, Keyu Duan et al.

The training paradigm for large language models (LLMs) is moving from static datasets to experience-based learning, where agents acquire skills via interacting with complex environments. To facilitate this transition we introduce GEM (General Experience Maker), an open-source environment simulator designed for the age of LLMs. Analogous to OpenAI-Gym for traditional reinforcement learning (RL), GEM provides a standardized framework for the environment-agent interface, including asynchronous vectorized execution for high throughput, and flexible wrappers for easy extensibility. GEM also features a diverse suite of environments, robust integrated tools, and single-file example scripts demonstrating using GEM with five popular RL training frameworks. Along with this, we also provide a set of baselines across 24 environments using REINFORCE with Return Batch Normalization (ReBN), which -- unlike GRPO -- is compatible with the full RL setting of dense per-turn rewards and offers better credit assignment. We further conduct apple-to-apple benchmarking of PPO, GRPO and REINFORCE in both single- and multi-turn settings using GEM to shed light on the algorithmic designs. Lastly, GEM also functions as a convenient evaluation toolkit besides a training environment. We hope this framework can help accelerate future agentic LLM research.

Wei Gao, Yuheng Zhao, Dilxat Muhtar et al.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key driver for improving the multi-step reasoning and tool-use capabilities of LLMs. However, its efficiency is bottlenecked by long-tail rollouts with multi-turn environment interactions, making static GPU provisioning a poor fit: overprovisioning wastes GPUs on stragglers, while underprovisioning increases contention and slows training. We observe that production serving clusters routinely leave substantial GPU compute and memory headroom. Based on this observation, we argue for cooperative elasticity: opportunistically repurposing underutilized serving GPUs to execute rollouts. Realizing cooperative elasticity is non-trivial because it must preserve serving Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under bursty traffic and minimize communication overhead. To address these challenges, we present ROSE, a cooperative, resource-elastic post-training system that safely harvests idle compute and memory on serving GPUs to accelerate agentic RL rollouts. ROSE consists of three components: (1) an SLO-safe co-serving executor that improves rollout throughput while preserving serving SLOs through efficient GPU memory and compute sharing; (2) a cross-cluster weight transfer engine that leverages weight shards and sparsity for fast weight synchronization across clusters; and (3) an elastic rollout scheduler that dynamically provisions cooperative capacity and routes trajectory rollouts across dedicated rollout GPUs and opportunistic serving GPUs. Experiments across multiple model sizes and cluster scales show that ROSE improves average end-to-end throughput by 1.20-3.31 x compared with state-of-the-art resource-fixed and elastic baselines.

Wei Gao, Yuheng Zhao, Dakai An et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a pivotal post-training technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, synchronous RL post-training often suffers from significant GPU underutilization, referred to as bubbles, caused by imbalanced response lengths within rollout steps. Many RL systems attempt to alleviate this problem by relaxing synchronization, but this can compromise training accuracy. In this paper, we introduce tail batching, a novel rollout scheduling strategy for synchronous RL that systematically consolidates prompts leading to long-tail responses into a small subset of rollout steps (long rounds), while ensuring that the majority of steps (short rounds) involve only balanced, short rollouts. By excluding long responses from short rounds and rescheduling them into a few designated long rounds, tail batching effectively reduces GPU idle time during rollouts and significantly accelerates RL training without sacrificing accuracy. We present RollPacker, a system that fully harnesses the benefits of tail batching through holistic optimizations across all three RL stages: elastic parallelism adaptation for rollout, dynamic resource allocation and scheduling for reward, and stream-based training. Empirical results show that RollPacker achieves a 2.03x-2.56x end-to-end training time reduction compared to veRL and up to 2.24x speedup compared to RLHFuse for the Qwen2.5 family of LLMs on up to 128 H800 GPUs.

Yang Li, Zhichen Dong, Yuhan Sun et al.

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work positions attention as a privileged substrate that renders the internal logic of LLMs legible, not merely as a byproduct of computation, but as a mechanistic blueprint of reasoning itself. We first distinguish attention heads between locally and globally focused information processing and reveal that locally focused heads produce a sawtooth pattern near the diagonal indicating phrasal chunks, while globally focused heads expose tokens that exert broad downstream influence over future tokens. We formalize these with two metrics: 1) Windowed Average Attention Distance, which measures the extent of backward attention within a clipped window; 2) Future Attention Influence, which quantifies a token's global importance as the average attention it receives from subsequent tokens. Taken together, these signals reveal a recurring preplan-and-anchor mechanism, where the model first performs a long-range contextual reference to generate an introductory token, which is immediately followed by or coincides with a semantic anchor token that organizes subsequent reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce three novel RL strategies that dynamically perform targeted credit assignment to critical nodes (preplan tokens, anchor tokens, and their temporal coupling) and show consistent performance gains across various reasoning tasks. By aligning optimization with the model's intrinsic reasoning rhythm, we aim to transform opaque optimization into an actionable structure-aware process, hoping to offer a potential step toward more transparent and effective optimization of LLM reasoning.

Han Lu, Zichen Liu, Shaopan Xiong et al.

Synchronous Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training has emerged as a crucial step for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse capabilities. However, many systems designed to accelerate RL post-training still suffer from low resource utilization and limited scalability. We present ROLL Flash, a system that extends ROLL with native support for asynchronous RL post-training. ROLL Flash is built upon two core design principles: fine-grained parallelism and rollout-train decoupling. Guided by these principles, ROLL Flash provides flexible programming interfaces that enable a fully asynchronous training architecture and support efficient rollout mechanisms, including queue scheduling and environment-level asynchronous execution. Through comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ROLL Flash significantly improves resource utilization and scalability over synchronous RL post-training. ROLL Flash achieves up to 2.24x speedup on RLVR tasks and 2.72x on agentic tasks, using the same GPU budget as synchronous baselines. Furthermore, we implement several popular off-policy algorithms and verify that asynchronous training can achieve performance on par with synchronous training.

Yuhan Sun, Zhiwei Huang, Wanqing Cui et al.

In AI-powered e-commerce livestreaming, digital avatars require real-time responses to drive engagement, a task for which high-latency Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are ill-suited. We introduce LiveThinking, a practical two-stage optimization framework to bridge this gap. First, we address computational cost by distilling a 670B teacher LRM into a lightweight 30B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model (3B active) using Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT). This reduces deployment overhead but preserves the teacher's verbose reasoning, causing latency. To solve this, our second stage employs reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to compress the model's reasoning path, guided by a multi-objective reward function balancing correctness, helpfulness, and brevity. LiveThinking achieves a 30-fold reduction in computational cost, enabling sub-second latency. In real-world application on Taobao Live, it improved response correctness by 3.3% and helpfulness by 21.8%. Tested by hundreds of thousands of viewers, our system led to a statistically significant increase in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV), demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing user experience and commercial performance in live, interactive settings.

Yanshi Li, Shaopan Xiong, Gengru Chen et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This reflects a key credit assignment problem: identifying which tokens to reinforce or suppress. To rectify these shortcomings, step-wise and token-wise methods have been proposed. However, step-wise methods rely on punctuation segmentation and still cannot accurately identify the key tokens. The token-level approach is too fine-grained, attending to many unimportant tokens and thus introducing a large amount of noise. To assign more accurate rewards to different tokens, improving credit assignment, we propose the "Adaptive Segment-wise Reward" method. We employ semantic meaning, rather than punctuation, to adaptively delineate segments. Experiments demonstrate that our method can be integrated into various training methods. Compared to training methods \textit{without} our approach, our method improves the success rate on adversarial samples by 10\%, and achieves a 1.3\% improvement on evaluation benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, etc.