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**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
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
Works with PEFT and VLMs out of the box.
**Open Reward Standard environment adapter**
The new
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
**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
