FastGRPO: Accelerating Policy Optimization via Concurrency-aware Speculative Decoding and Online Draft Learning

Abstract: Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated significant potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs via reinforcement learning. However, its practical deployment is impeded by an excessively slow training process, primarily attributed to the computationally intensive autoregressive generation of multiple responses per query, which makes the generation phase the primary performance bottleneck. Although speculative decoding presents a promising direction for acceleration, its direct application in GRPO achieves limited speedup under high-concurrency training conditions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a concurrency-aware speculative decoding framework that dynamically adjusts the drafting and verification strategy according to real-time concurrency levels, thereby maximizing the acceleration of the generation process. Furthermore, to address performance degradation arising from distributional drift between the evolving target model and the fixed draft model during training, we introduce an online draft learning mechanism that enables the draft model to continuously adapt using feedback signals from the target model. Experimental results across multiple mathematical reasoning datasets and models demonstrate that the proposed method achieves end-to-end speedups of 2.35x to 2.72x, significantly surpassing baseline approaches in efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/yedaotian9/GRPO_speculative.