hermes-agent/skills/mlops/trl-fine-tuning/references/online-rl.md
teknium1 ab0f4126cf fix: restore all removed bundled skills + fix skills sync system
- Restored 21 skills removed in commits 757d012 and 740dd92:
  accelerate, audiocraft, code-review, faiss, flash-attention, gguf,
  grpo-rl-training, guidance, llava, nemo-curator, obliteratus, peft,
  pytorch-fsdp, pytorch-lightning, simpo, slime, stable-diffusion,
  tensorrt-llm, torchtitan, trl-fine-tuning, whisper

- Rewrote sync_skills() with proper update semantics:
  * New skills (not in manifest): copied to user dir
  * Existing skills (in manifest + on disk): updated via hash comparison
  * User-deleted skills (in manifest, not on disk): respected, not re-added
  * Stale manifest entries (removed from bundled): cleaned from manifest

- Added sync_skills() to CLI startup (cmd_chat) and gateway startup
  (start_gateway) — previously only ran during 'hermes update'

- Updated cmd_update output to show new/updated/cleaned counts

- Rewrote tests: 20 tests covering manifest CRUD, dir hashing, fresh
  install, user deletion respect, update detection, stale cleanup, and
  name collision handling

75 bundled skills total. 2002 tests pass.
2026-03-06 15:57:30 -08:00

1.9 KiB

Online RL Methods

Guide to online reinforcement learning with PPO, GRPO, RLOO, and OnlineDPO.

Overview

Online RL generates completions during training and optimizes based on rewards.

PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization)

Classic RL algorithm for LLM alignment.

Basic Usage

python -m trl.scripts.ppo \
    --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct \
    --reward_model_path reward-model \
    --dataset_name trl-internal-testing/descriptiveness-sentiment-trl-style \
    --output_dir model-ppo \
    --learning_rate 3e-6 \
    --per_device_train_batch_size 64 \
    --total_episodes 10000 \
    --num_ppo_epochs 4 \
    --kl_coef 0.05

Key Parameters

  • kl_coef: KL penalty (0.05-0.2)
  • num_ppo_epochs: Epochs per batch (2-4)
  • cliprange: PPO clip (0.1-0.3)
  • vf_coef: Value function coef (0.1)

GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization)

Memory-efficient online RL.

Basic Usage

from trl import GRPOTrainer, GRPOConfig
from datasets import load_dataset

# Define reward function
def reward_func(completions, **kwargs):
    return [len(set(c.split())) for c in completions]

config = GRPOConfig(
    output_dir="model-grpo",
    num_generations=4,  # Completions per prompt
    max_new_tokens=128
)

trainer = GRPOTrainer(
    model="Qwen/Qwen2-0.5B-Instruct",
    reward_funcs=reward_func,
    args=config,
    train_dataset=load_dataset("trl-lib/tldr", split="train")
)
trainer.train()

Key Parameters

  • num_generations: 2-8 completions
  • max_new_tokens: 64-256
  • Learning rate: 1e-5 to 1e-4

Memory Comparison

Method Memory (7B) Speed Use Case
PPO 40GB Medium Maximum control
GRPO 24GB Fast Memory-constrained
OnlineDPO 28GB Fast No reward model

References