FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Song, Mingyang, Zheng, Mao, Li, Zheng, Yang, Wenjie, Luo, Xuan, Pan, Yue, Zhang, Feng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Song, Mingyang
Zheng, Mao
Li, Zheng
Yang, Wenjie
Luo, Xuan
Pan, Yue
Zhang, Feng
author_facet Song, Mingyang
Zheng, Mao
Li, Zheng
Yang, Wenjie
Luo, Xuan
Pan, Yue
Zhang, Feng
contents Improving training efficiency continues to be one of the primary challenges in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL). In this paper, we investigate how context length and the complexity of training data influence the RL scaling training process of R1-distilled reasoning models, e.g., DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B. Our experimental results reveal that: (1) simply controlling the context length and curating the training data based on the input prompt length can effectively improve the training efficiency of RL scaling, achieving better performance with more concise CoT; (2) properly scaling the context length helps mitigate entropy collapse; and (3) carefully choosing the context length facilitates achieving efficient LLM training and reasoning. Inspired by these insights, we propose FastCuRL, a curriculum RL framework with stage-wise context scaling to achieve efficient LLM training and reasoning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FastCuRL-1.5B-V3 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning models on five competition-level benchmarks and achieves 49.6% accuracy on AIME 2024. Furthermore, FastCuRL-1.5B-Preview surpasses DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview on five benchmarks while only using a single node with 8 GPUs and a total of 50% of training steps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17287
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models
Song, Mingyang
Zheng, Mao
Li, Zheng
Yang, Wenjie
Luo, Xuan
Pan, Yue
Zhang, Feng
Computation and Language
Improving training efficiency continues to be one of the primary challenges in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL). In this paper, we investigate how context length and the complexity of training data influence the RL scaling training process of R1-distilled reasoning models, e.g., DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B. Our experimental results reveal that: (1) simply controlling the context length and curating the training data based on the input prompt length can effectively improve the training efficiency of RL scaling, achieving better performance with more concise CoT; (2) properly scaling the context length helps mitigate entropy collapse; and (3) carefully choosing the context length facilitates achieving efficient LLM training and reasoning. Inspired by these insights, we propose FastCuRL, a curriculum RL framework with stage-wise context scaling to achieve efficient LLM training and reasoning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FastCuRL-1.5B-V3 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning models on five competition-level benchmarks and achieves 49.6% accuracy on AIME 2024. Furthermore, FastCuRL-1.5B-Preview surpasses DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview on five benchmarks while only using a single node with 8 GPUs and a total of 50% of training steps.
title FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17287