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Aligning LLMs to be helpful, honest, harmless, and huggy (H4)

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sergiopaniego 
posted an update 5 days ago
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Frontier models use distillation as a step of their post-training pipelines.

In 2026 it has three jobs: compress a big model into a small one, merge RL experts into a single model, and let a model teach itself.

I wrote up which frontier models use each one and how: https://huggingface.co/blog/sergiopaniego/distillation-2026

It pairs with Class 2 of the Training an Agent series Ben and I are doing, where we teach these techniques hands-on with TRL!
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albertvillanova 
posted an update 8 days ago
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🎉 KTO is now part of the stable TRL API

As of Promote KTO to stable API, KTOTrainer and KTOConfig have graduated from trl.experimental to the stable trl API. https://github.com/huggingface/trl/pull/6175

This one closes out a long road. Over the past 6+ months, the "Align KTO with DPO" effort landed ~90 PRs methodically bringing KTO up to the standard we hold for stable trainers, one carefully-scoped change at a time:
- Feature parity with DPO: full VLM support (incl. multi-image), sync_ref_model, PEFT + Liger, ZeRO-3 + PEFT dtype fix, pad_to_multiple_of, activation offloading, IterableDataset and dict eval_dataset, remove_unused_columns, and reference-logprob precomputation at init.
- Consistency with DPO: aligned method order and signatures, tokenization, _prepare_dataset, PEFT handling, ref-model preparation for distributed training, and config layout — plus a new DataCollatorForKTO and output format. Metrics moved into _compute_loss and simplified to direct averages via the shared _metrics attribute.
- Removing legacy baggage: dropped encoder-decoder support, BOS/EOS handling, null_ref_context, generate_during_eval, model_init, preprocess_logits_for_metrics, model/ref adapter names, and several dead config knobs.
- Coverage: a full test suite mirroring DPO, text collator tests, VLM tests, and slow tests.
- The promotion itself: the experimental → stable move (#6175) and shim cleanup (#6287), handled so downstream users get a clean deprecation path.

Honestly, this has been one of the more complex tasks I've taken on since joining the team, not because any single change was hard, but because it demanded sustained consistency across a ~2,000-line trainer, with every branch, comment, and edge case kept in lockstep with DPO.

Huge thanks to everyone who reviewed along the way (especially @qgallouedec ), the incremental review cadence is exactly what kept this maintainable.

KTO now sits on equal footing with our other flagship trainers. 🚀
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abidlabs 
posted an update 17 days ago
sergiopaniego 
posted an update 17 days ago
sergiopaniego 
posted an update 24 days ago
sergiopaniego 
posted an update 27 days ago
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GLM-5.2 is open and comes with competitive performance against opus 4.8

day-0 in transformers + vllm + sglang, mit license 🤗

on the post-training side: critic-based ppo for variable-length agentic rollouts (ppo is back!) + an online anti-reward-hacking module that feeds the agent dummy info when it tries to cheat
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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OpenEnv has a new home: github.com/huggingface/OpenEnv

Starting today, it's coordinated by a committee that includes Meta-PyTorch, Reflection, Unsloth, Modal, Prime Intellect, Nvidia, Mercor, Fleet AI, and Hugging Face

frontier labs train their models and their harnesses together. Claude knows Claude Code. GPT-5.5 knows Codex. that's not an accident, it's training. open-source models deserve the same magic, but pulling that off requires infrastructure that belongs to everyone, not one lab

OpenEnv is that layer. one api, any harness, any trainer, any environment

Rewards and training loops stay in TRL, Unsloth, wherever you already work. OpenEnv is the socket they all plug into

Get involved!

Full announcement: https://huggingface.co/blog/openenv-agentic-rl
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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Frontier agents are this good partly because the model was trained inside the very harness it ships with.

NVIDIA's new paper "Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale" brings that recipe to the open: it turns coding harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Code or Pi into RL training environments without touching their internals.

The core idea: every agent, however complex or closed, talks to a model through an API, so they put a proxy there. The harness runs exactly like in production while the proxy records prompts, sampled token ids and logprobs. Trajectories get rebuilt outside, token faithful, so gradients hit the exact tokens the policy sampled.

The gains are consistent across all four harnesses. Same Qwen3.5-4B, plain GRPO, evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified:

Codex 3.8 → 26.4 (+22.6)
Claude Code 29.8 → 34.6 (+4.8)
Qwen Code 34.6 → 35.2 (+0.6)
Pi 34.2 → 40.4 (+6.2)

The biggest gains appear on unfamiliar execution paths, Codex being the clearest case. The takeaway: you are not just training a model, you are training the model + harness system.

Two engineering pieces make it work at scale. Async worker pools isolate container boots (CPU), agent execution (GPU) and long tail test runs, so slow runtimes never block the GPUs. And prefix merging stitches hundreds of captured API calls back into contiguous traces: 5.4x faster trainer updates and rollout GPUs at 88% utilization.

It also doubles as an SFT data factory: 504 test verified agent traces from a 122B teacher, multi-turn conversations averaging 104 messages each, coming to the Hub under Apache 2.0 (release pending review).

Paper authors: Binfeng Xu, Hao Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Songyang Han, Mingjie Liu, Jian Hu, Shizhe Diao, Zhenghui Jin, Yunheng Zou, Michael Demoret, Jan Kautz and Yi Dong.

> Paper: Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale (2605.24220)
> Code: https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/ProRL-Agent-Server
> Training data: NovaSky-AI/SkyRL-v0-293-data
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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The recording from our talk: "From Responses To Trajectories: Multi-Turn and Multi-Environment RL" from PyTorch Conf Europe is live!

@kashif and I covered the latest advances in multi-turn GRPO in TRL: trajectories, tool use, envs, and agentic post-training at scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPBeXFntJSU
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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how do you sync a trillion parameter model every RL step without a shared cluster? we just wrote a blog about it, led by @aminediroHF

what I like the most is the way it proves you can use the Hub for basically everything 🧐 → trainer on one machine, vLLM in a HF Space, the wordle env in another HF Space and weights going through a Hub Bucket. no shared cluster, just HTTPS

it works because ~99% of bf16 weights don't change between RL steps so you only sync the diff. 1.2 GB to 25 MB of payload per step

https://huggingface.co/blog/delta-weight-sync
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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most multi-turn RL loops have a silent bug: you decode the model's output to detect tool calls, then re-tokenize the conversation for the next turn. BPE isn't invertible, so decode then re-encode can land on different ids. gradient ends up on tokens the model never sampled. no crash, just quietly wrong math and broken training

@qgallouedec wrote a super educational blog on MITO (message-in, token-out) vs TITO (token-in, token-out) and how you might fix the problem above

go read it 🤓

https://qgallouedec-tito.hf.space/
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 1 month ago
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new banger blog alert 🚨

@ariG23498 is starting a blog series about profiling in pytorch and part 1 just dropped

takes you from the simplest scenario to actually knowing what your gpu is doing. if you have never opened a profiler trace this is where you start

covers torch.profiler from scratch. reading tables and traces, overhead bound vs compute bound, the full dispatch chain from python to gpu kernels, and what torch.compile is actually fusing under the hood

find it here: https://huggingface.co/blog/torch-profiler
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sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 2 months ago
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If you have a github repo, you basically have an RL training environment

We're introducing Repo2RLEnv (built by @AdithyaSK ), a tool that mines PRs, commits, CVEs and turns them into verifiable sandboxed tasks with real reward signals, automatically

Outputs to Harbor spec so you can plug it straight into RL training or coding-agent eval

> repo: https://github.com/huggingface/Repo2RLEnv
> collection with envs: https://huggingface.co/collections/AdithyaSK/repo2rlenv-verifiable-rl-environments
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 2 months ago
sergiopaniego 
posted an update about 2 months ago
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Harness, Scaffold, Context Engineering, Agent... do you actually know what they mean?

We wrote an AI agent glossary and tried to make sense of it all with simple definitions and real examples

↓ go read it ↓

https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-glossary
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alvarobartt 
posted an update about 2 months ago
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Open agents on AWS SageMaker AI with open models from the Hugging Face Hub!

> Deploy an open model from the Hugging Face Hub on SageMaker AI
> Connect the deployed model to Strands Agents
> Add built-in and custom tools for tool calling
> Expose external capabilities through MCP integration
> Bonus: talk to your agent and visualize traces with Gradio

https://alvarobartt.com/agents-on-aws-sagemaker