Distributed RLHF Frameworks in Production: Comparing OpenRLHF, verl, and TRL Architecture, Ray Resource Scheduling, and Rollout-Training Co-Location
Post-training alignment has shifted from offline preference tuning to large-scale, online reinforcement learning. Modern post-training loops for reasoning models, agentic workflows, and conversational alignment require coordinating multiple distinct neural network roles simultaneously. Under standard Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), an RL infrastructure pipeline must manage up to four distinct model instances: the Actor (the active policy undergoing gradient updates), the Critic (the value mo

