Anyscale and NovaSky Workforce Releases SkyRL tx v0.1.0: Bringing Tinker Suitable Reinforcement Studying RL Engine To Native GPU Clusters

How can AI groups run Tinker type reinforcement studying on giant language fashions utilizing their very own infrastructure with a single unified engine? Anyscale and NovaSky (UC Berkeley) Workforce releases SkyRL tx v0.1.0 that provides builders a approach to run a Tinker suitable coaching and inference engine immediately on their very own {hardware}, whereas preserving the identical minimal API that Tinker exposes within the managed service.

The analysis workforce describes SkyRL tx as a unified coaching and inference engine that implements the Tinker API and permits folks to run a Tinker like service on their very own infrastructure. This v0.1.0 model is the primary of its collection that helps reinforcement studying finish to finish, and it additionally makes sampling considerably sooner.

Tinker API briefly

Tinker from Pondering Machines is a coaching API constructed round 4 core features. forward_backward performs a ahead move and a backward move and accumulates gradients. optim_step updates mannequin weights primarily based on these gradients. pattern generates tokens for interplay, analysis or RL actions. save_state writes checkpoints for resuming coaching.

As an alternative of a full process particular advantageous tuning abstraction, Tinker exposes these low stage primitives in order that customers can implement their very own supervised or reinforcement studying loops in common Python code, whereas the service handles GPU scheduling and distributed execution.

SkyRL tx targets this actual API and implements an open backend that customers can deploy regionally. It retains the Tinker programming mannequin, whereas eradicating the necessity to rely solely on the hosted setting.

The place SkyRL tx matches inside SkyRL

SkyRL is a full stack reinforcement studying library for big language fashions that features skyrl-agent for lengthy horizon brokers, skyrl-train for coaching, and skyrl-gym for instrument use environments reminiscent of math, coding, search and SQL.

Inside this stack, skyrl-tx is marked as an experimental cross platform library that exposes an area Tinker like REST API for mannequin publish coaching. SkyRL tx subsequently turns into the system layer that connects RL logic, environments and coaching code to concrete GPU sources via the Tinker interface.

Structure, inference engine that additionally trains

The SkyRL tx structure is described as an inference engine that additionally helps backward passes. It has 4 essential elements:

1. REST API server that processes incoming requests from completely different customers.
2. Database that tracks metadata about fashions, checkpoints, requests and futures, and in addition acts as a job queue. The present implementation makes use of SQLite behind an interface that additionally helps different SQL databases reminiscent of Postgres.
3. Engine that schedules and batches requests throughout customers. Every engine occasion serves a single base mannequin and might connect many LoRA adapters.
4. Employee that executes ahead and backward passes and holds mannequin definitions and optimizer states. A number of staff can be enabling extra superior multi node sharding in upcoming variations

What v0.1.0 provides?

The v0.1.0 launch focuses on reinforcement studying help and efficiency enhancements. The official launch highlights a number of concrete modifications:

• Sampling is now a lot sooner, since it’s jitted and correctly batched and sharded within the engine.
• Completely different sampling parameters per request, per request seeds and cease tokens at the moment are supported, which is helpful when many experiments share a base mannequin.
• After a number of fixes, the RL loop now runs correctly via the engine.
• Gradient checkpointing help and micro batching for sampling are applied.
• Postgres is now supported as a database backend, subsequent to SQLite.

Operating RL finish to finish on 8 H100 GPUs

The official launch incorporates a selected code recipe for working reinforcement studying finish to finish on a cluster with 8 H100 GPUs.

First, customers clone the SkyRL repository and within the skyrl-tx folder begin the engine with:

uv run --extra gpu --extra tinker -m tx.tinker.api 
  --base-model Qwen/Qwen3-4B 
  --max-lora-adapters 3 
  --max-lora-rank 1 
  --tensor-parallel-size 8 
  --train-micro-batch-size 8 > out.log

Then they clone the Tinker Cookbook from the Pondering Machines workforce and within the tinker_cookbook/recipes folder run:

export TINKER_API_KEY=dummy
export WANDB_API_KEY=
uv run --with wandb --with tinker rl_loop.py 
  base_url=http://localhost:8000 
  model_name="Qwen/Qwen3-4B" 
  lora_rank=1 
  max_length=1024 
  save_every=100

This produces a reward curve that confirms the RL loop runs accurately via the native SkyRL tx backend.

Key Takeaways

• SkyRL tx v0.1.0 implements an area, Tinker suitable engine that unifies coaching and inference for LLM publish coaching.
• The system exposes Tinker primitives, forward_backward, optim_step, pattern and save_state over REST, whereas dealing with batching, LoRA adapters and machine placement internally.
• Structure is cut up into API server, SQL database, scheduling engine and staff that execute ahead and backward passes for a single base mannequin with a number of LoRA adapters.
• v0.1.0 provides finish to finish reinforcement studying help, sooner jitted and sharded sampling, per request sampling parameters, gradient checkpointing, micro batching and Postgres help.

SkyRL tx v0.1.0 is a sensible step for dev groups that need Tinker type reinforcement studying on their very own clusters with a constant Tinker API floor. The design that treats the system as an inference engine that additionally runs backward passes is clear and reduces stack divergence. Help for LoRA, gradient checkpointing, micro batching and Postgres is a concrete methods improve. General, this launch turns Tinker compatibility into an actionable native RL backend for LLM

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