New post-training example: SFT on agent traces with TRL
→ A large model works as a coding agent in OpenCode, run through OpenEnv → The tasks it solves become the training data → A 2B model goes from 5.5% to 34.4% on held-out tasks
About 500 traces get most of the gain. Five times more add only 3 to 4 points, so SFT gets the agent working and RL has to do the rest
Last week we closed the Training Agents series IRL at the GitHub offices in SF
4 talks, a panel and audience Q&A. almost 2h on post-training agents with open models
> Learnings from enterprise RL (Govind Kamtamneni Microsoft) > Environments and benchmarks in industry (Victor Barres Mercor) > How to train your agents with Miles (Tao Lin RadixArk) > Why we built OpenEnv Arena (Xiangyi Li BenchFlow)
ThinkingBox from @microsoft is now available as an OpenEnv env (cc @tuhink🤗 )!
> ThinkingBox is a sandbox for testing agents on business workflows. it simulates a customer, gives the agent MCP tools over a real database, and at the end checks what changed in that database instead of trusting the agent's last message
> ThinkingBox-Bench is the benchmark built on it: 507 tasks across retail, insurance, travel, banking and consulting
> the OpenEnv env runs each task as an episode in its own isolated backend and returns a pass/fail reward from those checks
ICYMI, Async GRPO in TRL now supports LoRA and we wrote a looong blog testing it
> the adapter is a few megabytes, so the weight sync is a file instead of an NCCL transfer > 3 HF Jobs: 1 trainer and 2 vLLM replicas > the adapter travels through an HF Storage Bucket mounted in all 3 at the same path > a proxy in front of the replicas routes each rollout to the one already holding its KV prefix