Last updated: 02/17/2025.
Let’s start with the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm, which is most widely used algorithm in LLM post-training.
The main entry point of the PPO algorithm example is: main_ppo.py. In this tutorial, we will go through the code architecture in main_ppo.py.
Define the dataUsers need to preprocess and store the dataset in parquet files. And we implement RLHFDataset to load and tokenize the parquet files.
For RLHFDataset
(Default), at least 1 fields are required:
prompt
: Contains the string prompt
We already provide some examples of processing the datasets to parquet files in data_preprocess directory. Currently, we support preprocess of GSM8k, MATH, Hellasage, Full_hh_rlhf datasets. See Prepare Data for Post-Training for more information.
Define the reward functions for different datasetsIn this main entry point, the users only need to define their own reward function based on the datasets (or applications) utilized in PPO training.
For example, we already provide reward functions for GSM8k and MATH datasets in the _select_rm_score_fn
. In the RewardManager
, we will compute the reward score based on the data_source to select corresponding reward functions. For some RLHF datasets (e.g., full_hh_rlhf), the reward model is utilized to assess the responses without any reward functions. In this case, the RewardManager
will return the rm_score
computed by the reward model directly.
See reward functions for detailed implementation.
Define worker classesif config.actor_rollout_ref.actor.strategy in {"fsdp", "fsdp2"}: # for FSDP backend assert config.critic.strategy in {"fsdp", "fsdp2"} from verl.workers.fsdp_workers import ActorRolloutRefWorker, CriticWorker from verl.single_controller.ray import RayWorkerGroup ray_worker_group_cls = RayWorkerGroup elif config.actor_rollout_ref.actor.strategy == 'megatron': # for Megatron backend assert config.actor_rollout_ref.actor.strategy == config.critic.strategy from verl.workers.megatron_workers import ActorRolloutRefWorker, CriticWorker from verl.single_controller.ray.megatron import NVMegatronRayWorkerGroup ray_worker_group_cls = NVMegatronRayWorkerGroup # Ray worker class for Megatron-LM else: raise NotImplementedError from verl.trainer.ppo.ray_trainer import ResourcePoolManager, Role role_worker_mapping = { Role.ActorRollout: ActorRolloutRefWorker, Role.Critic: CriticWorker, Role.RefPolicy: ActorRolloutRefWorker } global_pool_id = 'global_pool' resource_pool_spec = { global_pool_id: [config.trainer.n_gpus_per_node] * config.trainer.nnodes, } mapping = { Role.ActorRollout: global_pool_id, Role.Critic: global_pool_id, Role.RefPolicy: global_pool_id, }Step 1: Construct the mapping between roles and workers
A role represents a group of workers in the same process. We have pre-defined several roles in ray_trainer.py.
class Role(Enum): """ To create more roles dynamically, you can subclass Role and add new members """ Actor = 0 # This worker only has Actor Rollout = 1 # This worker only has Rollout ActorRollout = 2 # This worker has both actor and rollout, it's a HybridEngine Critic = 3 # This worker only has critic RefPolicy = 4 # This worker only has reference policy RewardModel = 5 # This worker only has reward model ActorRolloutRef = 6 # This worker contains actor, rollout and reference policy simultaneouslyStep 2: Define the worker class corresponding to this role
We have pre-implemented the ActorRolloutRefWorker
. Through different configs, it can be a standalone actor, a standalone rollout, an ActorRollout HybridEngine, or an ActorRolloutRef HybridEngine
We also pre-implemented workers for Actor
, Rollout
, Critic
, Reward Model
and Reference model
on two different backend: PyTorch FSDP and Megatron-LM. See FSDP Workers and Megatron-LM Workers for more information.
Resource pool is a division of global GPU resources, resource_pool_spec
is a dict, mapping from id to # of GPUs
In the above example, we defined a global resource pool: global_pool_id, and then put all roles on this one resource pool with all the GPUs in this post-training task. This refers to co-locate placement where all the models share the same set of GPUs.
See resource pool and placement for advance usage.
# we should adopt a multi-source reward function here # - for rule-based rm, we directly call a reward score # - for model-based rm, we call a model # - for code related prompt, we send to a sandbox if there are test cases # - finally, we combine all the rewards together # - The reward type depends on the tag of the data if config.reward_model.enable: from verl.workers.fsdp_workers import RewardModelWorker role_worker_mapping[Role.RewardModel] = RewardModelWorker mapping[Role.RewardModel] = global_pool_id reward_fn = RewardManager(tokenizer=tokenizer, num_examine=0) # Note that we always use function-based RM for validation val_reward_fn = RewardManager(tokenizer=tokenizer, num_examine=1) resource_pool_manager = ResourcePoolManager(resource_pool_spec=resource_pool_spec, mapping=mapping)
Since not all tasks use model-based RM, users need to define here whether it’s a model-based RM or a function-based RM
If it’s a model-based RM, directly add the RewardModel
role in the resource mapping and add it to the resource pool mapping.
Note that the pre-defined RewardModelWorker
only supports models with the structure of huggingface AutoModelForSequenceClassification
. If it’s not this model, you need to define your own RewardModelWorker in FSDP Workers and Megatron-LM Workers.
If it’s a function-based RM, the users are required to classified the reward function for each datasets.
def _select_rm_score_fn(data_source): if data_source == 'openai/gsm8k': return gsm8k.compute_score elif data_source == 'lighteval/MATH': return math.compute_score else: raise NotImplementedError
See reward functions implemented in directory for more information.
Define, init and run the PPO Trainertrainer = RayPPOTrainer(config=config, tokenizer=tokenizer, role_worker_mapping=role_worker_mapping, resource_pool_manager=resource_pool_manager, ray_worker_group_cls=ray_worker_group_cls, reward_fn=reward_fn, val_reward_fn=val_reward_fn) trainer.init_workers() trainer.fit()
We first initialize the RayPPOTrainer
with user config, tokenizer and all the above worker mapping, resource pool, worker group and reward functions
We first call the trainer.init_workers()
to initialize the models on the allocated GPUs (in the resource pool)
The actual PPO training will be executed in trainer.fit()
verl can be easily extended to other RL algorithms by reusing the Ray model workers, resource pool and reward functions. See extension for more information.
Details of the RayPPOTrainer
is discussed in Ray Trainer.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4