Artificial Intelligence · 10.08.2026, 09:55 UTC
DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.LG ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 10.08.2026 UTC |
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arXiv:2605.15422v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states. In large-rollout, long-context RL training (N>=16, P>=8K), this redundancy dominates the policy update cost. We observe that in decoder-only models, causal masking makes prompt representations invariant across sequences at every layer, so all per-token operations (norms, projections, MLP) and attention can process the prompt once -- a property not yet exploited at the kernel level for training. We propose DualKV, the first FlashAttention kernel variant that eliminates shared-prompt replication during RL training, via (1) fused CUDA forward and backward kernels that iterate over two disjoint KV regions -- shared context and per-sequence response -- in a single kernel launch, and (2) a data-pipeline redesign in veRL that repacks N(P+R) tokens into P+NR tokens per micro-batch, extending the token reduction from attention to the entire model by a factor rho = N(P+R)/(P+NR). DualKV is mathematically equivalent to standard attention and introduces no approximation. On Qwen3-8B GRPO training with 8xH100 GPUs (N=32, 8K-context), DualKV achieves 1.63--2.09x policy-update speedup, enables 2x larger micro-batches, and raises MFU from 36% to 76%. Similar gains hold for DAPO (2.47x speedup, 77% MFU). At 30B MoE scale on 16xH100, …