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Efficient RLHF: Reducing the Memory Usage of PPO

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arxiv 2309.00754 v1 pith:3U6WHGE5 submitted 2023-09-01 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Efficient RLHF: Reducing the Memory Usage of PPO

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords memoryusagerlhfduringhumanhydra-ppoloramodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has revolutionized language modeling by aligning models with human preferences. However, the RL stage, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), requires over 3x the memory of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), making it infeasible to use for most practitioners. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive analysis the memory usage, performance, and training time of memory-savings techniques for PPO. We introduce Hydra-RLHF by first integrating the SFT and Reward models and then dynamically turning LoRA "off" during training. Our experiments show: 1. Using LoRA during PPO reduces its memory usage to be smaller than SFT while improving alignment across four public benchmarks, and 2. Hydra-PPO reduces the latency per sample of LoRA-PPO by up to 65% while maintaining its performance. Our results demonstrate that Hydra-PPO is a simple and promising solution for enabling more widespread usage of RLHF.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Reference-Sampled Boltzmann Projection for KL-Regularized RLVR: Target-Matched Weighted SFT, Finite One-Shot Gaps, and Policy Mirror Descent

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Reference-sampled weighted SFT with prompt-normalized Boltzmann weights induces the same policy as fixed-reference KL-regularized RLVR, with BOLT as the estimator and a finite one-shot error decomposition separating c...

  2. Not How Many, But Which: Parameter Placement in Low-Rank Adaptation

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Gradient-informed placement of LoRA parameters recovers full performance under GRPO while random placement does not, due to differences in gradient rank and stability across training regimes.

  3. MARLaaS: Multi-Tenant Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning as a Service

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MARLaaS enables concurrent RL fine-tuning across up to 32 tasks using LoRA adapters and a disaggregated asynchronous architecture, matching single-task performance while improving accelerator utilization by 4.3x and c...

  4. Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    REGLU guides LoRA-based unlearning via representation subspaces and orthogonal regularization to outperform prior methods on forget-retain trade-off in LLM benchmarks.

  5. HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework

    cs.LG 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HybridFlow combines single- and multi-controller paradigms with a 3D-HybridEngine to deliver 1.53x to 20.57x higher throughput for various RLHF algorithms compared to prior systems.

  6. Reinforcement Learning for Scalable and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    Reinforcement learning is advanced for communication-efficient federated optimization and for preference-aligned, contextually safe policies in large language models.