The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Summary
We introduce MIPI (Monotonic Inference Policy Improvement) and its instantiation MIPU, a two-step RL framework for LLMs that addresses the training-inference mismatch by explicitly aligning optimization with inference-policy improvement. Under FP8-quantized rollout, MIPU achieves improved reasoning performance and training stability across Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B models.
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Paper page - The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.29526 We introduce MIPI (Monotonic Inference Policy Improvement) and its instantiation MIPU, a two-step RL framework for large language models under training–inference mismatch.
As illustrated in the figure, standard LLM RL methods optimize training-side surrogates, which do not necessarily translate into improvements of the deployed inference policy due to persistent engine-level mismatch (e.g., FP8 quantization or backend inconsistency).
MIPU addresses this by explicitly decomposing inference-policy improvement into (i) training-side update and (ii) post-synchronization inference gap. Step 1 constructs sampler-referenced policy updates to improve candidate quality, while Step 2 performs inference-gap-aware acceptance to filter updates that do not yield consistent improvements after synchronization.
Under FP8-quantized rollout, MIPU achieves both improved reasoning performance and significantly enhanced training stability across Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B.
The figure summarizes the core idea: instead of optimizing only the training policy, MIPU directly aligns optimization with inference-policy improvement under real deployment mismatch.
- Project Page:https://anitaleungxx.github.io/MIPU/
- Paper:https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.29526
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