verl

ByteDance's HybridFlow-based RL training library for LLMs with PPO, GRPO, and Megatron or FSDP backends.

Open SourceSelf HostedOffline CapableGPU Required
0.0 (0)

About

ByteDance's Volcano Engine team built verl as the open-source implementation of the HybridFlow paper, whose hybrid-controller programming model lets complex post-training dataflows like PPO be expressed in a few lines of code while still executing efficiently across large clusters. The library pairs training backends, FSDP, FSDP2, and Megatron-LM, with the vLLM and SGLang rollout engines, scales to models with hundreds of billions of parameters including expert parallelism for MoE architectures such as DeepSeek and Qwen, and implements PPO, GRPO, GSPO, ReMax, REINFORCE++, RLOO, PRIME, DAPO, and DrGRPO. Throughput features include sequence packing, dynamic batching, and resharding that eliminates memory redundancy when switching between training and generation phases. Installation is pip from GitHub, multi-GPU NVIDIA hardware is assumed, and documentation lives at verl.readthedocs.io. Apache-2.0 licensed with about 22,700 GitHub stars, it became the dominant open framework for reasoning-model RL, used widely across academia and industry to reproduce and extend DeepSeek-R1-style training.

Should you use verl?

Pick it when

Use it when you train reasoning models with PPO, GRPO, DAPO, or similar on multi-GPU NVIDIA clusters and need FSDP or Megatron backends, vLLM or SGLang rollouts, and expert parallelism for DeepSeek or Qwen MoE models.

Look elsewhere when

Multi-GPU NVIDIA hardware is assumed and installation is from GitHub, so a single-GPU experiment is better served by TRL. For adding RL to an existing agent without restructuring code, OpenPipe ART is simpler.

Alternatives to verl

  • OpenRLHF

    Similar Ray and vLLM based RL with a broad algorithm list on DeepSpeed, but no Megatron backend for the largest MoE models.

  • TRL

    Single-GPU friendly GRPO and DPO on Transformers with PEFT; far easier to start, not built for hundreds-of-billions scale.

  • ms-swift

    Offers GRPO and PPO with a Megatron backend inside a general fine-tuning toolkit with a web UI; broader, less RL-specialized.

  • OpenPipe ART

    Wraps GRPO on LoRA behind an OpenAI-compatible client for agents; much less infrastructure, much smaller training scope.

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Details

Price
Free
Platform
Local/Desktop
Difficulty
Advanced (4/5)
License
Apache-2.0
Added
Jul 29, 2026

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