Training Tutorials

NeMo RL

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This tutorial trains NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 9B v2 to improve its multi-step tool-calling capability using the GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) algorithm on the Workplace Assistant environment.

Workplace Assistant is a realistic office simulation (calendar, email, project management, etc.) with complex multi-step tasks, providing a strong data distribution for training enterprise-ready tool-using assistants.

Goal: Train a model for multi-step tool calling using GRPO on the Workplace Assistant environment.

Time: ~3-5 hours (full series)

In this tutorial, you will:

  1. Set up NeMo RL and NeMo Gym for reinforcement learning training
  2. Understand the Workplace Assistant environment and its multi-step tool calling tasks
  3. Configure and run GRPO training on Nemotron Nano v2 9B
  4. Monitor training progress via Weights & Biases (W&B)

TL;DR: Want to jump straight to running commands? Skip to Setup.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have these prerequisites ready:

  • ✅ Hardware: 1+ nodes with 8× NVIDIA GPUs (80GB+ each, such as H100 or A100)
    • Single-node testing: 1 node with 8 GPUs
    • Multi-node production: 8+ nodes with 8 GPUs each recommended
    • RAM: 64 GB+ per node
  • ✅ Storage: 100 GB+ free disk space on a shared filesystem
  • ✅ Software: Linux, Python 3.12+, Git, Slurm for multi-node training
  • ✅ Familiarity: Python, LLM fine-tuning, basic RL concepts (in-depth RLVR/GRPO knowledge not required)

NeMo Gym does not require GPUs. GPUs are only necessary for GRPO training with NeMo RL.

Optional accounts:

  • Weights & Biases (W&B): For experiment tracking (sign up, get API key). Training proceeds without W&B if not configured.
  • HuggingFace: For downloading models (create token). Recommended to avoid rate limits.

Total time estimate: ~3-5 hours (including environment setup, data preparation, and training)

Tutorial Steps

Follow these steps sequentially to complete the tutorial:

1. About the Workplace Assistant Training Environment

Understand the dataset you will train on and its multi-step tool calling tasks.

background
2. Gym Configuration

Understand the Gym configuration component in the NeMo RL training config file.

configuration
3. NeMo RL Configuration

Understand the GRPO and NeMo RL configuration components in the training config file.

configuration
4. Setup

Clone repositories, install dependencies, and prepare the training data.

prerequisite
5. Single Node Training

Perform a single node GRPO training run with success criteria.

training
6. Multi-Node Training

Scale to multi-node GRPO training for production.

training

Next Steps

After completing this tutorial, explore these options:

Use Other Training Environments

Explore other environments available for training and evaluation.

githubresources-servers
Build a Custom Training Environment

Create your own resources server with custom tools and verification logic.

tutorialcustom-tools