Post
1617
TRL v1.2 introduces the SSDTrainer 🚀
Simple Self-Distillation (SSD) from Apple's paper "Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation" is now available as an experimental trainer in TRL.
The recipe is as minimal as the name suggests: sample completions from the model itself at a training-time temperature, then fine-tune on those raw, unverified samples with plain cross-entropy. No reward model. No verifier. No teacher model. No reinforcement learning. Just prompts and the model.
v1.2 also ships expanded tool-calling support (LLaMA 3.1 / 3.2, DeepSeek-V3), another round of KTO ↔ DPO alignment getting us closer to promoting KTO to stable, a big GRPO simplification for overlong tool results, deprecation of
Full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/trl/releases/tag/v1.2.0
Simple Self-Distillation (SSD) from Apple's paper "Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation" is now available as an experimental trainer in TRL.
The recipe is as minimal as the name suggests: sample completions from the model itself at a training-time temperature, then fine-tune on those raw, unverified samples with plain cross-entropy. No reward model. No verifier. No teacher model. No reinforcement learning. Just prompts and the model.
from trl.experimental.ssd import SSDConfig, SSDTrainer
trainer = SSDTrainer(
model="Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct",
args=SSDConfig(temperature=0.6, top_k=20, top_p=0.95),
train_dataset=dataset,
)
trainer.train()v1.2 also ships expanded tool-calling support (LLaMA 3.1 / 3.2, DeepSeek-V3), another round of KTO ↔ DPO alignment getting us closer to promoting KTO to stable, a big GRPO simplification for overlong tool results, deprecation of
use_transformers_paged, and key fixes for VLM response parsing.Full release notes: https://github.com/huggingface/trl/releases/tag/v1.2.0