Recipe: CollabLLM

Last updated: 09/22/2025.

Open-Source Algorithm Implementation & Expriement Running: Haiquan Chen, Shirley Wu

🏠 Homepage | 📝 Paper | 🤗 Datasets & Models | ⭐️ Original Implementation

verl provides a recipe for the Outstanding Paper at ICML 2025, "CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators". CollabLLM is a unified fine-tuning framework that optimizes LLMs for effective and efficient multiturn collaboration with users.

Core Idea: Models are rewarded based on how well their responses enable effective future collaboration with users.

Paper Authors: Shirley Wu, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Gavin Li, Yao Dou, Weixin Cai, James Zou, Jure Leskovec, Jianfeng Gao

Quick Start

0. Environment

Make sure the required packages for verl are installed. Additionally, install litellm and export the required API keys. The API model will be used for user simulators and, optionally, LLM Judges (see the Configuration section below).

1. Prepare Your Dataset

First, process your dataset using the provided script (see example commands and usage in process_dataset.py):

python process_dataset.py --dataset <> ... --dataset_type <sft or rl>

Requirements:

Input: A Hugging Face multiturn dataset. Existing datasets: collabllm/collabllm-multiturn-$DATASET, with DATASET in one of [math-hard(-large), medium(-large), bigcodebench(-large)] (*-large are the datasets used in the CollabLLM paper)
Example format: See collabllm-multiturn-math-hard
To generate your own dataset: Use build_dataset.py from the original CollabLLM repository

2. Train Your Model

(Optional) For Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT):

bash train_sft_collabllm.sh

For Reinforcement Learning (RL):

bash train_rl_collabllm.sh

The RL script shows an example to train CollabLLM on math-hard-large.

The config to sample future conversations are in recipe/collabllm/config/collabllm_interaction_config.yaml.
The Multiturn-aware Reward is aggregated from these three conversational-level rewards:
```
+reward_model.reward_kwargs.metric_weights.accuracy=1 \
+reward_model.reward_kwargs.metric_weights.interactivity=1 \
+reward_model.reward_kwargs.metric_weights.token_amount=-0.0001 \
```
You can remove, add, or modify the weights depending on your task. A list of implemented metrics you can already add are under recipe/collabllm/metrics. For example, on medium-large, you can replace accuracy with bleu_score via
```
+reward_model.reward_kwargs.metric_weights.bleu_score=1 
```
which will instead apply bleu score on the sampled future conversations.

Algorithm

Step	Name	Description
1	Model response generation	The model generates multiple responses for each prompt in a batch.
2	Collaborative simulation	A user simulator (e.g., GPT or Claude) samples `num_repeat_rollouts` conversations for up to `max_user_turns` additional turns.
3	Compute Multiturn-aware Reward	Customized conversational reward functions are applied to the sampled conversations. Rewards are aggregated, then averaged across rollouts.
4	Update model	The model weights are updated using the computed multiturn-aware rewards.

Configuration

The primary configuration is managed through the launch script train_rl_collabllm.sh and the YAML file recipe/collabllm/config/collabllm_interaction_config.yaml. Key configuration sections:

Section	Key Parameters / Notes
`data`	Paths to training/validation files, batch sizes, sequence lengths.
`actor_rollout_ref` (common)	Base model path (used for actor + initial reference), FSDP settings, optimization (LR, scheduler).
`actor_rollout_ref` (CollabLLM-specific)	Hyperparameters under `actor_rollout_ref.rollout.multi_turn`: `max_user_turns`, `max_assistant_turns`, `num_repeat_rollouts`.
`interaction`	Defined in `collabllm_interaction_config.yaml`. Specifies user simulator and hyperparameters. Requires exported API keys.
`reward_model`	Manager set to `collabllm` by default. Modify `reward_model.reward_kwargs.metric_weights` for conversational rewards and weights. LLM Judge hyperparameters (e.g., `model`, `temperature`) go under `reward_model.reward_kwargs.llm_judge_kwargs`.
`algorithm`	GRPO-specific hyperparameters such as `actor_rollout_ref.rollout.n`.
`trainer`	Distributed training (nodes, GPUs per node), logging (WandB), checkpointing frequency.

Key Files

File Path	Purpose
`recipe/collabllm/collabllm_agent_loop.py`	Main logic to sample future conversations, using `CollabLLMInteraction` from `verl/interactions/collabllm_interaction.py`.
`verl/workers/reward_manager/collabllm.py`	Computes rewards for future conversations, leveraging `recipe/collabllm/reward_function.py` to apply each metric.

Acknowledgement

We sincerely thank the verl community and advisors for their contributions and guidance!