veRL: Volcano Engine Reinforcement Learning for LLM

veRL is a flexible, efficient and production-ready RL training framework designed for large language models (LLMs).

veRL is the open-source version of HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework paper.

veRL is flexible and easy to use with:

• Easy extension of diverse RL algorithms: The Hybrid programming model combines the strengths of single-controller and multi-controller paradigms to enable flexible representation and efficient execution of complex Post-Training dataflows. Allowing users to build RL dataflows in a few lines of code.

• Seamless integration of existing LLM infra with modular APIs: Decouples computation and data dependencies, enabling seamless integration with existing LLM frameworks, such as PyTorch FSDP, Megatron-LM and vLLM. Moreover, users can easily extend to other LLM training and inference frameworks.

• Flexible device mapping: Supports various placement of models onto different sets of GPUs for efficient resource utilization and scalability across different cluster sizes.

• Readily integration with popular HuggingFace models

veRL is fast with:

• State-of-the-art throughput: By seamlessly integrating existing SOTA LLM training and inference frameworks, veRL achieves high generation and training throughput.

• Efficient actor model resharding with 3D-HybridEngine: Eliminates memory redundancy and significantly reduces communication overhead during transitions between training and generation phases.

| Documentation | Paper | Slack | Wechat |

News

• [2024/12] The team presented Post-training LLMs: From Algorithms to Infrastructure at NeurIPS 2024. Slides and video available.
• [2024/10] veRL is presented at Ray Summit. Youtube video available.
• [2024/08] HybridFlow (verl) is accepted to EuroSys 2025.

Key Features

• FSDP and Megatron-LM for training.
• vLLM and TGI for rollout generation, SGLang support coming soon.
• huggingface models support
• Supervised fine-tuning
• Reward model training
• Reinforcement learning from human feedback with PPO
• flash-attention integration, sequence packing
• scales up to 70B models and hundreds of GPUs
• experiment tracking with wandb and mlflow

Getting Started

Checkout this Jupyter Notebook to get started with PPO training with a single 24GB L4 GPU (FREE GPU quota provided by Lighting Studio)!

Quickstart:

• Installation
• Quickstart

Running an PPO example step-by-step:

• Data and Reward Preparation
  • Prepare Data (Parquet) for Post-Training
  • Implement Reward Function for Dataset
• Understanding the PPO Example
  • PPO Example Architecture
  • Config Explanation
  • Run GSM8K Example

Reproducible algorithm baselines:

• PPO

For code explanation and advance usage (extension):

• PPO Trainer and Workers
  • PPO Ray Trainer
  • PyTorch FSDP Backend
  • Megatron-LM Backend
• Advance Usage and Extension
  • Ray API Design Tutorial
  • Extend to other RL(HF) algorithms
  • Add models with the FSDP backend
  • Add models with the Megatron-LM backend

Citation and acknowledgement

If you find the project helpful, please cite:

• HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework
• A Framework for Training Large Language Models for Code Generation via Proximal Policy Optimization

@article{sheng2024hybridflow,
  title   = {HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework},
  author  = {Guangming Sheng and Chi Zhang and Zilingfeng Ye and Xibin Wu and Wang Zhang and Ru Zhang and Yanghua Peng and Haibin Lin and Chuan Wu},
  year    = {2024},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv: 2409.19256}
}

verl is inspired by the design of Nemo-Aligner, Deepspeed-chat and OpenRLHF. The project is adopted and supported by Anyscale, Bytedance, LMSys.org, Shanghai AI Lab, Tsinghua University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UIUC, and University of Hong Kong.

Publications Using veRL

• Enhancing Multi-Step Reasoning Abilities of Language Models through Direct Q-Function Optimization
• Flaming-hot Initiation with Regular Execution Sampling for Large Language Models
• Process Reinforcement Through Implicit Rewards

We are HIRING! Send us an email if you are interested in internship/FTE opportunities in MLSys/LLM reasoning/multimodal alignment.