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Jin: Token-level RL enables mixing instruct and base model fine-tuning

Roger Jin · What is an RL environment? w/ Nous Research's Roger Jin · Apr 29, 2025 · at 13:04

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Roger Jin discusses the technical advantages of designing reinforcement learning environments that interface with trainers at the token level.

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“Another thing you can do, like, with, in, in, like, the token world is, like, the trainer is now, like, agnostic to, like, chat versus instruct model. And what that means is, like, you can do all, like, the cool, like, R-one-zero kind of style, like, experiments. But it also means that you can mix together instruction instruct and base model fine-tuning, like, all at once.”

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