Jiacheng Liu
Publications
QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training--Inference Mismatch
Large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines are often bottlenecked by rollout generation, making end-to-end training slow. Recent work mitigates this by running rollouts with quantization to accelerate decoding, which is the most expensive stage of the RL loop. However, these setups destabilize optimization by amplifying the training-inference gap: rollouts are operated at low precision, while learning updates are computed at full precision. To address this challenge, we propose QaRL (Rollout Alignment Quantization-Aware RL), which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. We further identify a failure mode in quantized rollouts: long-form responses tend to produce repetitive, garbled tokens (error tokens). To mitigate these problems, we introduce TBPO (Trust-Band Policy Optimization), a sequence-level objective with dual clipping for negative samples, aimed at keeping updates within the trust region. On Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems, QaRL outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 while improving stability and preserving low-bit throughput benefits.
Just-in-Time Catching Test Generation at Meta
We report on Just-in-Time catching test generation at Meta, designed to prevent bugs in large scale backend systems of hundreds of millions of line of code. Unlike traditional hardening tests, which pass at generation time, catching tests are meant to fail, surfacing bugs before code lands. The primary challenge is to reduce development drag from false positive test failures. Analyzing 22,126 generated tests, we show code-change-aware methods improve candidate catch generation 4x over hardening tests and 20x over coincidentally failing tests. To address false positives, we use rule-based and LLM-based assessors. These assessors reduce human review load by 70%. Inferential statistical analysis showed that human-accepted code changes are assessed to have significantly more false positives, while human-rejected changes have significantly more true positives. We reported 41 candidate catches to engineers; 8 were confirmed to be true positives, 4 of which would have led to serious failures had they remained uncaught. Overall, our results show that Just-in-Time catching is scalable, industrially applicable, and that it prevents serious failures from reaching production.