Aligning Training and Rollout Policies for End-to-End FP4 RL on Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
Abstract
In this work, we study end-to-end FP4 reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models. Recent work on FP4 RL has introduced effective recovery recipes that restore accuracy under aggressive low-precision quantization for dense models, but we find that the same approach yields no improvement over the naive FP4 baseline in the MoE setting. We conduct an in-depth study to understand why. Our analysis identifies the root cause in the routing mechanism unique to MoE: because the router makes discrete expert-selection decisions, training–inference policy alignment becomes acutely sensitive to whether the same recovery technique is applied symmetrically on the training and inference sides. When an asymmetric recipe is used—including the dense-model approach, which corrects only the rollout—training–inference alignment deteriorates sharply, as measured by the Pearson correlation coefficient between training and inference probabilities, and router selection matching rates. Building on this finding, we propose MoeResQ, a quantization-recovery recipe for MoE RL post-training that enforces symmetry between the training- and inference-side corrections. MoeResQ restores training–inference alignment and substantially closes the accuracy gap to full precision, establishing symmetric recovery as the key principle in FP4 RL for MoE models.