> support for multimodal tool responses for environments (OpenEnv) > an example to train it in CARLA for autonomous driving with image-based tool calls
Hugging Face's TRL library is downloaded 3 million times a month. Over 130k models trained with it are public on the Hub, and major projects like @unsloth and @axolotl-ai-co build directly on top of it. v1.0 is the moment we acknowledged that responsibility explicitly, with a real stability contract.
The field hasn't settled. Building stable software in a domain that keeps invalidating its own assumptions is the actual problem we're solving. The answer is a design that can absorb the next shift without breaking what people rely on.
What's in v1.0: Deep Hugging Face integration, low infrastructure burden What's next: asynchronous GRPO, better scaling support, and making training legible enough that agents can inspect and steer it.
We just released a big blog surveying 16 OSS frameworks for async RL training of LLMs!
We're building a new async GRPO trainer for TRL and as first step, we needed to understand how the ecosystem solves this problem today.
The problem: in synchronous RL training, generation dominates wall-clock time. 32K-token rollouts on a 32B model take hours while training GPUs sit completely idle. With reasoning models and agentic RL making rollouts longer and more variable, this only gets worse.
The ecosystem converged on the same fix: separate inference + training onto different GPU pools, rollout buffer, and async weight sync.
We compared 16 frameworks across 7 axes: orchestration, buffer design, weight sync, staleness management, partial rollouts, LoRA, and MoE support.
This survey is step one. The async GRPO trainer for TRL is next!
Nemotron 3 Super by @nvidia is here! NVIDIA's hybrid Mamba2/Transformer models are now natively supported in transformers (no trust_remote_code needed)
Fine-tune them with TRL in just a few lines of code. Notebook + script included to get started right away. goooo!
What happens when you make an LLM drive a car where physics are real and actions can't be undone?
I ported CARLA, the autonomous driving simulator, to OpenEnv and added training support via TRL + Hugging Face Spaces.
The model interacts with the simulator through tool calls (observe, brake, change lane) and learns from a reward signal.
In 50 training steps, Qwen 0.6B learns to swerve and brake to avoid pedestrians in emergency situations.
The project supports text and vision (VLMs can see through a camera sensor), open-world driving with traffic, and multiple driving scenarios.
This builds on the carla-env project by sinatras, which originally placed LLMs inside CARLA for evaluation. We extended it with vision, new scenarios, rubric-based rewards, and made it trainable end-to-end.
🚀 TRL v0.29.0 introduces trl-training: an agent-native training skill.
This makes the TRL CLI a structured, agent-readable capability, allowing AI agents to reliably execute training workflows such as: - Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) - Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) - Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)
We’re excited to see what the community builds on top of this.
If you’re working on AI agents, alignment research, or scalable RL training infrastructure: give TRL v0.29.0 a try! 🤗