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.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04376
