TRL - Transformer Reinforcement Learning

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A comprehensive library to post-train foundation models

Overview

TRL is a cutting-edge library designed for post-training foundation models using advanced techniques like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Built on top of the 🤗 Transformers ecosystem, TRL supports a variety of model architectures and modalities, and can be scaled-up across various hardware setups.

Highlights

• Trainers: Various fine-tuning methods are easily accessible via trainers like SFTTrainer, GRPOTrainer, DPOTrainer, RewardTrainer and more.

• Efficient and scalable:

  • Leverages 🤗 Accelerate to scale from single GPU to multi-node clusters using methods like DDP and DeepSpeed.
  • Full integration with 🤗 PEFT enables training on large models with modest hardware via quantization and LoRA/QLoRA.
  • Integrates 🦥 Unsloth for accelerating training using optimized kernels.

• Command Line Interface (CLI): A simple interface lets you fine-tune with models without needing to write code.

Installation

Python Package

Install the library using pip:

pip install trl

From source

If you want to use the latest features before an official release, you can install TRL from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/trl.git

Repository

If you want to use the examples you can clone the repository with the following command:

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/trl.git

Quick Start

For more flexibility and control over training, TRL provides dedicated trainer classes to post-train language models or PEFT adapters on a custom dataset. Each trainer in TRL is a light wrapper around the 🤗 Transformers trainer and natively supports distributed training methods like DDP, DeepSpeed ZeRO, and FSDP.

SFTTrainer

Here is a basic example of how to use the SFTTrainer:

from trl import SFTTrainer
from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("trl-lib/Capybara", split="train")

trainer = SFTTrainer(
    model="Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B",
    train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()

GRPOTrainer

GRPOTrainer implements the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm that is more memory-efficient than PPO and was used to train Deepseek AI's R1.

from datasets import load_dataset
from trl import GRPOTrainer

dataset = load_dataset("trl-lib/tldr", split="train")

# Dummy reward function: count the number of unique caracteres in the completions
def reward_num_unique_chars(completions, **kwargs):
    return [len(set(c)) for c in completions]

trainer = GRPOTrainer(
    model="Qwen/Qwen2-0.5B-Instruct",
    reward_funcs=reward_num_unique_chars,
    train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()

DPOTrainer

DPOTrainer implements the popular Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm that was used to post-train Llama 3 and many other models. Here is a basic example of how to use the DPOTrainer:

from datasets import load_dataset
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from trl import DPOConfig, DPOTrainer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct")
dataset = load_dataset("trl-lib/ultrafeedback_binarized", split="train")
training_args = DPOConfig(output_dir="Qwen2.5-0.5B-DPO")
trainer = DPOTrainer(
    model=model,
    args=training_args,
    train_dataset=dataset,
    processing_class=tokenizer
)
trainer.train()

RewardTrainer

Here is a basic example of how to use the RewardTrainer:

from trl import RewardConfig, RewardTrainer
from datasets import load_dataset
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(
    "Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct", num_labels=1
)
model.config.pad_token_id = tokenizer.pad_token_id

dataset = load_dataset("trl-lib/ultrafeedback_binarized", split="train")

training_args = RewardConfig(output_dir="Qwen2.5-0.5B-Reward", per_device_train_batch_size=2)
trainer = RewardTrainer(
    args=training_args,
    model=model,
    processing_class=tokenizer,
    train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()

Command Line Interface (CLI)

You can use the TRL Command Line Interface (CLI) to quickly get started with post-training methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO):

SFT:

trl sft --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B \
    --dataset_name trl-lib/Capybara \
    --output_dir Qwen2.5-0.5B-SFT

DPO:

trl dpo --model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct \
    --dataset_name argilla/Capybara-Preferences \
    --output_dir Qwen2.5-0.5B-DPO 

Read more about CLI in the relevant documentation section or use --help for more details.

Development

If you want to contribute to trl or customize it to your needs make sure to read the contribution guide and make sure you make a dev install:

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/trl.git
cd trl/
pip install -e .[dev]

Citation

@misc{vonwerra2022trl,
  author = {Leandro von Werra and Younes Belkada and Lewis Tunstall and Edward Beeching and Tristan Thrush and Nathan Lambert and Shengyi Huang and Kashif Rasul and Quentin Gallouédec},
  title = {TRL: Transformer Reinforcement Learning},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/huggingface/trl}}
}

License

This repository's source code is available under the Apache-2.0 License.