SRT: Accelerating Reinforcement Learning via Speculative Rollout with Tree-Structured Cache

Chi-Chih Chang, Siqi Zhu, Zhichen Zeng, Haibin Lin, Xin Liu, Jiaxuan You, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah, Ziheng Jiang, Xuehai Qian

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Rollout, Speculative Decoding

Abstract: We present Speculative Rollout with Tree-Structured Cache (SRT), a simple, model-free approach to accelerate on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for language models without sacrificing distributional correctness. SRT exploits the empirical similarity of rollouts for the same prompt across training steps by storing previously generated continuations in a per-prompt tree-structured cache. During generation, the current policy uses this tree as the draft model for performing speculative decoding. To keep the cache fresh and improve draft model quality, SRT updates trees online from ongoing rollouts and proactively performs run-ahead generation during idle GPU bubbles. Integrated into standard RL pipelines (e.g., PPO, GRPO and DAPO) and multi-turn settings, SRT consistently reduces generation and step latency and lowers per-token inference cost, achieving up to 2.08× wall-clock time speedup in rollout.

Submission Number: 280