tomorrow (Tuesday, July 28), we're back with Class 3 of the Training Agents live series
🧠 what: reinforcement learning for training agents (GRPO): how it works, how to implement it in TRL, and end-to-end examples 🗓️ when: Tuesday, July 28 - 🕔 5:00 PM CEST / 8:30 PM IST 📍 where: Live on @huggingface's X, YouTube, and LinkedIn
you can now train your own coding agents with trl + openenv, starting with opencode
we just added end-to-end support for training agent harnesses:
> TRL: a loop-owning training path (AsyncGRPOTrainer + HarnessRolloutWorker) that launches the agent in an OpenEnv session, reads back its trace, reconstructs the training samples, and trains with AsyncGRPO > OpenEnv: the OpenCode harness environment plus a transparent proxy that forwards the agent's model calls and records each turn's token ids and logprobs
you train the actual opencode agent as is, it runs its own loop and tools and the policy learns from the exact tokens it produced
we're shipping a self-contained example: local subprocess sandbox, DeepCoder problems, validated on Qwen3-8B.
join us next Tuesday, July 28, for Class 3 of the Training Agents live series!
we'll dive into reinforcement learning for agent training, covering the intuition behind GRPO, how it works, and how to implement it in TRL with practical, e2e examples
+ continuous batching makes GRPO and RLOO 1.25x faster at -16 GB + proper MoE post-training across GRPO/RLOO/AsyncGRPO + new GMPO trainer + AsyncGRPO weight sync + padding-free + more
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
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
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:
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.
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
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
@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
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
🧪 Running an eval that executes model-generated C on a few thousand prompts? You probably don't want any of that on your laptop. Just shipped hf-sandbox, a Modal-style sandbox API on top of Hugging Face Jobs. Spin up an isolated, ephemeral container, run untrusted code, get the result back. No Docker on your laptop, no infra to manage.
