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albertvillanova 
posted an update 10 days ago
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3454
🎉 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. 🚀
  • 2 replies
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jeffboudier 
posted an update 13 days ago
abidlabs 
posted an update 19 days ago
cfahlgren1 
submitted a paper to Daily Papers about 1 month ago
victor 
posted an update about 2 months ago
tomaarsen 
posted an update about 2 months ago
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1262
🤗 Announcing the Ettin Reranker family: six new state-of-the-art CrossEncoder rerankers for search from 17M to 1B parameters, plus the full training data and the ~150-line recipe. Built on the Ettin ModernBERT encoders, Apache 2.0. Details:

All six were trained with the same single-stage pointwise MSE distillation recipe, with mixedbread-ai/mxbai-rerank-large-v2 (1.54B) as the teacher. Only the learning rate and per-device batch size change between sizes. The 1B student matches the teacher within 0.0001 NDCG@10 on MTEB(eng, v2) Retrieval, the 150M is the strongest reranker I tested in the under-600M range, and the 17M beats the 33M ms-marco-MiniLM-L12-v2 by +0.051 NDCG@10 at roughly half the parameter count.

Speed matters as much as quality for a reranker, since it determines whether the model fits the latency budget between retrieval and showing results. Our 17M is the fastest reranker in the whole comparison at 7517 pairs/sec on an H100. Our 150M runs 2.3x faster than the two other 150M ModernBERT-base rerankers (gte-reranker-modernbert-base and granite-embedding-reranker-english-r2) because the modular Transformer module propagates unpadded inputs through every layer rather than just the FA2 attention kernel. And our 1B is 2.4x faster than its 1.5B teacher while matching it on quality.

I bootstrapped the training recipe with the new train-sentence-transformers Agent Skill shipped in Sentence Transformers v5.5.0. Install it with hf skills add train-sentence-transformers --claude and ask Claude Code (or Codex / Cursor / Gemini CLI) to fine-tune a SentenceTransformer, CrossEncoder, or SparseEncoder model on your data.

I wrote a blog post walking through usage, results across six embedder pairings, the speed story, and the complete training script. Check it out, or just point your Agent to the URL:

https://huggingface.co/blog/ettin-reranker

Collection: https://huggingface.co/collections/cross-encoder/ettin-rerankers
tomaarsen 
posted an update 2 months ago
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552
🤖 I've just published Sentence Transformers v5.5.0, headlined by a new train-sentence-transformers Agent Skill that lets your AI coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, ...) train and finetune embedding, reranker, and sparse encoder models for you. Plus training losses & fixes. Details:

The skill bundles curated guidance for the whole training workflow across all three model types: base model selection, loss and evaluator choice, hard-negative mining, distillation, LoRA, Matryoshka, multilingual training, static embeddings, etc. It also ships production-ready training template scripts the agent can adapt. Install it with hf skills add train-sentence-transformers, then just describe what you want, e.g. "finetune a reranker on my (question, answer) pairs, mine hard negatives, and push it to the Hub".

On the loss side: EmbedDistillLoss is a new embedding-level distillation loss for SentenceTransformer. Instead of distilling teacher scores like MarginMSELoss, it aligns the student's embeddings directly with pre-computed teacher embeddings, wtih an optional learnable projection for when the student and teacher dimensions differ. Second, ADRMSELoss is a new listwise learning-to-rank loss for CrossEncoder from the Rank-DistilLLM paper, aimed at the LLM-distillation reranking setting.

encode() and predict() also gained a per-call processing_kwargs override, so you can change processor settings like max_length, a vision-language model's image resolution, or a video's fps, for a single call without rebuilding the model.

The Agent Skill is the part of this release I'm most keen for people to try. Curious to hear how it works for you. I've been using it myself a lot to quickly set up some training runs that immediately use a bunch of best practices.

> pip install sentence-transformers==5.5.0
> hf skills add train-sentence-transformers

The full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/sentence-transformers/releases/tag/v5.5.0
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qgallouedec 
posted an update 2 months ago
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10532
Shipped hf-sandbox! 🥡

🧪 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.

Just pip install hf-sandbox.

Early days (v0.1); feedback and issues very welcome:
👉 https://github.com/huggingface/hf-sandbox
  • 1 reply
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qgallouedec 
posted an update 2 months ago
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442
**TRL v1.4 is out 🚀** Chunked NLL loss for SFT and a first-class **OpenReward** integration.

**Chunked NLL loss for SFT — drops peak VRAM by up to 14×**

Standard SFT materializes a full [batch × seq × vocab] logits tensor before computing cross-entropy, which dominates peak memory at long context lengths. The new loss_type="chunked_nll" path drops ignored-label tokens before the lm_head matmul and computes cross-entropy in checkpointed chunks of 256.

Peak GPU memory, AdamW fp32:
- Qwen3-14B, 8×H100 FSDP2, 16k seq: 58.9 GB → 38.9 GB
- Qwen3-4B, 1×H100 80GB, 16k seq: OOM → 63.8 GB
- Qwen3-32B, 8×H100 FSDP2, 8k seq: OOM → 71.2 GB

End-to-end it's consistently as fast or faster than nll, and unlocks sequence lengths that don't fit at all under the standard path.

SFTConfig(loss_type="chunked_nll")


Works with PEFT and VLMs out of the box.

**Open Reward Standard environment adapter**

The new trl.experimental.openreward adapter plugs any environment speaking the [Open Reward Standard](https://openrewardstandard.io) protocol into any TRL trainer that takes an environment_factory. One string — a catalog name or a URL — wires the dataset, factory, and reward_func slots; tools are bound dynamically from JSON Schema, no per-env wrapper code:

from trl import GRPOTrainer
from trl.experimental.openreward import OpenRewardSpec

spec = OpenRewardSpec("Eigent/SETA", num_tasks=64)

trainer = GRPOTrainer(
    ...,
    train_dataset=spec.train_dataset,
    environment_factory=spec.environment_factory,
    reward_funcs=spec.reward_funcs,
)


v1.4 also brings MFU helpers for dense + MoE models, GRPO support for Liger 0.8.0 (delta clipping + VESPO + KL bias correction), Tülu 3's length-normalized DPO loss, four more training chat templates (Cohere, Cohere2, Gemma 3, Qwen3-2507), and a 5+ GB CUDA memory leak fix in activation offloading.

Full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/trl/releases/tag/v1.4.0
qgallouedec 
posted an update 3 months ago
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TRL v1.3 ships day-one training support for Qwen 3.6 🚀

The new Qwen 3.6 family (Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B, Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) reuses the Qwen3.5-MoE architecture but ships a slightly different chat template, so we updated the stack end-to-end: new training template with {% generation %} markers, tool-call response schema routing, tiny test models for the VLM matrix.

SFT with assistant-only loss works out of the box:

from trl import SFTConfig, SFTTrainer

trainer = SFTTrainer(
    model="Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B",
    args=SFTConfig(assistant_only_loss=True),
    train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()


So does GRPO tool-calling — just hand tools=[...] to GRPOTrainer.

v1.3 also brings a new experimental TPO trainer (Triple Preference Optimization), speculative decoding in trl vllm-serve (Qwen3 MTP / Eagle3 drafts), 12 more KTO ↔ DPO alignment PRs (KTO promotion to stable is now in reach), three more {% generation %} chat templates (Gemma/Gemma 2, Phi-3, GLM-4-MoE), and a chunky SFT entropy bug fix.

Full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/trl/releases/tag/v1.3.0
qgallouedec 
posted an update 3 months ago
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2073
TRL v1.2 introduces the SSDTrainer 🚀

Simple Self-Distillation (SSD) from Apple's paper "Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation" is now available as an experimental trainer in TRL.

The recipe is as minimal as the name suggests: sample completions from the model itself at a training-time temperature, then fine-tune on those raw, unverified samples with plain cross-entropy. No reward model. No verifier. No teacher model. No reinforcement learning. Just prompts and the model.

from trl.experimental.ssd import SSDConfig, SSDTrainer

trainer = SSDTrainer(
    model="Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct",
    args=SSDConfig(temperature=0.6, top_k=20, top_p=0.95),
    train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()


v1.2 also ships expanded tool-calling support (LLaMA 3.1 / 3.2, DeepSeek-V3), another round of KTO ↔ DPO alignment getting us closer to promoting KTO to stable, a big GRPO simplification for overlong tool results, deprecation of use_transformers_paged, and key fixes for VLM response parsing.

Full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/trl/releases/tag/v1.2.0
victor 
posted an update 3 months ago
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6202
Want to share my enthusiasm for zai-org/GLM-5.1 here too 🔥

I think we have it: our open source Claude Code = GLM-5.1 + Pi (https://pi.dev/) - Built a Three.js racing game to eval and it's extremely impressive. Thoughts:

- One-shot car physics with real drift mechanics (this is hard)

- My fav part: Awesome at self iterating (with no vision!) created 20+ Bun.WebView debugging tools to drive the car programmatically and read game state. Proved a winding bug with vector math without ever seeing the screen

- 531-line racing AI in a single write: 4 personalities, curvature map, racing lines, tactical drifting. Built telemetry tools to compare player vs AI speed curves and data-tuned parameters

- All assets from scratch: 3D models, procedural textures, sky shader, engine sounds, spatial AI audio!

- Can do hard math: proved road normals pointed DOWN via vector cross products, computed track curvature normalized by arc length to tune AI cornering speed

You are going to hear about this model a lot in the next months - open source let's go - and thanks z-ai🚀🚀
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tomaarsen 
posted an update 3 months ago
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1087
🌐 I've just published Sentence Transformers v5.4 to make the project fully multimodal for embeddings and reranking. The release also includes a modular CrossEncoder, and automatic Flash Attention 2 input flattening. Details:

You can now use SentenceTransformer and CrossEncoder with text, images, audio, and video, with the same familiar API. That means you can compute embeddings for an image and a text query using model.encode(), compare them with model.similarity(), and it just works. Models like Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B and jinaai/jina-reranker-m0 are supported out of the box.

Beyond multimodal, I also fully modularized the CrossEncoder class. It's now a torch.nn.Sequential of composable modules, just like SentenceTransformer has been. This unlocked support for generative rerankers (CausalLM-based models like mxbai-rerank-v2 and the Qwen3 rerankers) via a new LogitScore module, which wasn't possible before without custom code.

Also, Flash Attention 2 now automatically skips padding for text-only inputs. If your batch has a mix of short and long texts, this gives you a nice speedup and lower VRAM usage for free.

I wrote a blog post walking through the multimodal features with practical examples. Check it out if you want to get started, or just point your Agent to the URL: https://huggingface.co/blog/multimodal-sentence-transformers

This release has set up the groundwork for more easily introducing late-interaction models (both text-only and multimodal) into Sentence Transformers in the next major release. I'm looking forward to it!
qgallouedec 
posted an update 4 months ago
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2486
TRL v1.0 is out!

Hugging Face's TRL library is downloaded 3 million times a month. Over 130k models trained with it are public on the Hub, and major projects like @unsloth and @axolotl-ai-co build directly on top of it. v1.0 is the moment we acknowledged that responsibility explicitly, with a real stability contract.

The field hasn't settled. Building stable software in a domain that keeps invalidating its own assumptions is the actual problem we're solving. The answer is a design that can absorb the next shift without breaking what people rely on.

What's in v1.0:
Deep Hugging Face integration, low infrastructure burden
What's next: asynchronous GRPO, better scaling support, and making training legible enough that agents can inspect and steer it.

pip install --upgrade trl


Read more: hf.co/blog/trl-v1