Asynchrony Is Nearly Free for Evolution Strategies on Long-Horizon LLM Agentic Tasks

William Hoy, Jingxuan Fan, Nurcin Celik, Xu Pan

Synchronous policy updates can limit the efficiency of post-training for long-horizon LLM agents. When trajectories span multiple interaction turns, completion times can vary substantially, and synchronous update barriers leave faster workers idling, wasting compute resources. Asynchronous reinforcement learning addresses this inefficiency but introduces policy lag and off-policy optimization. Evolution strategies (ES) are a backpropagation-free alternative to gradient-based training, yet require many perturbed-policy evaluations and have remained largely synchronous in current LLM post-training. We introduce bounded-staleness asynchronous ES and investigate its training behavior under stale fitness measurements. On WebShop, we systematically vary the lag and fraction of stale fitness measurements and additionally introduce two stress tests to probe extreme staleness cases. Natural asynchrony closely tracks synchronous ES, and degradation in evaluation accuracy remains small even under extreme staleness, including when all fitness measurements are stale. These findings suggest that ES can tolerate substantial policy staleness without explicit off-policy correction, supporting its…