Heddle: A Distributed Orchestration System for Agentic RL Rollout

Abstract

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables LLMs to solve complex tasks by alternating between a data-collection rollout phase and a policy training phase. During rollout, the agent generates trajectories, i.e., multi-step interactions between LLMs and external tools. Yet, frequent tool calls induce long-tailed trajectory generation that bottlenecks rollouts. This stems from step-centric designs that ignore trajectory context, triggering three system problems for long-tail trajectory generation: queueing delays, interference overhead, and inflated per-token time. We propose Heddle, a trajectory-centric system to optimize the when, where, and how of agentic rollout execution. Heddle integrates three core mechanisms: trajectory-level scheduling using runtime prediction and progressive priority to minimize cumulative queueing; trajectory-aware placement via presorted dynamic programming and opportunistic migration during idle tool call intervals to minimize interference; and trajectory-adaptive resource manager that dynamically tunes model parallelism to accelerate the per-token time of long-tail trajectories while maintaining high throughput for short trajectories. Evaluations across diverse agentic RL workloads demonstrate that Heddle effectively neutralizes the long-tail bottleneck, achieving up to 2.5$\times$ higher end-to-end rollout throughput compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Figures (16)

• Figure 1: Illustration of the agentic trajectory and the straggler effect.
• Figure 2: Long-tailed distribution of coding agents.
• Figure 3: Existing agentic RL framework.
• Figure 4: CDF of normalized agentic trajectory completion time.
• Figure 5: Trajectory length distribution across different prompts.

Theorems & Definitions (1)

• Lemma 5.1