Stabilizing MoE Reinforcement Learning by Aligning Training and Inference Routers

摘要

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial approach for enhancing the capabilities of large language models. However, in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, the routing mechanism often introduces instability, even leading to catastrophic RL training collapse. We analyze the training-inference consistency of MoE models and identify a notable discrepancy in routing behaviors between the two phases. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{Rollout Routing Replay (R3)}, a novel and effective method that records routing distributions from the inference engine and replays them during training. R3 significantly reduces training-inference policy KL divergence and mitigates extreme discrepancies without compromising training speed. Extensive experiments on various settings confirm that R3 succeeds in stabilizing RL training, preventing collapse and outperforming strong baselines. R3 is orthogonal to most policy optimization algorithm improvements, allowing it to be used in conjunction with them. We believe this work can offer a new solution for stabilizing RL in MoE model.