Webscale-RL: Automated Data Pipeline for Scaling RL Data to Pretraining Levels

arXiv cs.CL / 4/13/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces Webscale-RL, a pipeline designed to transform large-scale pretraining documents into millions of diverse, verifiable question-answer pairs for reinforcement learning (RL).
  • It reports building a Webscale-RL dataset with 1.2 million examples spanning 9+ domains, aiming to overcome the long-standing RL data bottleneck versus web-scale corpora.
  • Experiments indicate that RL training on this dataset outperforms continual pretraining and several data refinement baselines across multiple benchmarks.
  • The authors claim major training-efficiency gains, stating RL can reach continual-pretraining performance using up to 100× fewer tokens.
  • Overall, the work proposes a practical route to scale RL “to pretraining levels,” targeting both stronger reasoning and improved compute efficiency for language model development.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success through imitation learning on vast text corpora, but this paradigm creates a training-generation gap and limits robust reasoning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a more data-efficient solution capable of bridging this gap, yet its application has been constrained by a critical data bottleneck: existing RL datasets are orders of magnitude smaller and less diverse than web-scale pre-training corpora. To address this, we introduce the Webscale-RL pipeline, a scalable data engine that systematically converts large-scale pre-training documents into millions of diverse, verifiable question-answer pairs for RL. Using this pipeline, we construct the Webscale-RL dataset, containing 1.2 million examples across more than 9 domains. Our experiments show that the model trained on this dataset significantly outperforms continual pretraining and strong data refinement baselines across a suite of benchmarks. Notably, RL training with our dataset proves substantially more efficient, achieving the performance of continual pre-training with up to 100\times fewer tokens. Our work presents a viable path toward scaling RL to pre-training levels, enabling more capable and efficient language models.