Records the M2d lever (batch the GRPO training-side forwards), the right-pad-is-free
insight, both exact gates, the end-to-end no-OOM smoke, and the 9× throughput.
The honest decomposition correction: M2c claimed the training forwards "dominate" the
step; the clean per-component bench falsifies the strong form — they were ~2.5 s of
the ~8.5 s step (~30%), worth the 9×, but the rollout (~6 s) was always the larger
share. After M2d the step is ~95% rollout, so the next step-level lever is full B×G
rollout batching (today only the G samples of each prompt decode in lockstep; the B
prompts are still sequential). Same measure-first lesson, once more.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>