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THE EXPERIMENT HANDBOOK

Put an idea to the test.

16 algorithm walkthroughs and experiment notes. From a training loop to agents that search, act and interpret images.

16 experiments Each note explains the method and its implementation limits
01

Loss Functions

An intuition for reinforcement learning losses

Understand importance sampling, PPO clipping and CISPO through intuitive examples, equations and the policy updates used in this lab.

Foundations & optimization
02

GRPO

Learn from comparisons within a group

Follow GRPO from group sampling and rewards to policy updates on GSM8K, with runnable PyTRIO code and a comparison of three loss functions.

Foundations & optimization
03

Vision GRPO

Bring images into reinforcement learning

Connect image inputs, geometry reasoning and verifiable rewards on GeoQA, with multimodal training code and evaluation details.

Multimodal & frontier work
04

PyTrio-Jev

Train your own classification and decision model

Fine-tune Qwen3.5-4B on 2,160 records with LoRA, then run restricted-softmax inference, temperature calibration and five benchmark evaluations.

Multimodal & frontier work
05

General OPD

Teach the student on its own trajectories

Build a minimal on-policy distillation loop on DeepMath-103K: student sampling, teacher scoring and reverse KL, with code and evaluation notes.

Distillation & self-learning
06

Medical OPD

Balance specialist and general capabilities

Start from medical SFT and study SAR-OPD and IDT-OPD, with specialist and general-task evaluations and explicit experimental limitations.

Distillation & self-learning
07

DAPO

Unpack four changes to training stability

Examine DAPO’s four core changes and the practical time cost of dynamic sampling through training code, equations and recorded experiments.

Foundations & optimization
08

GSPO

Optimize at the sequence level

Implement sequence-level importance ratios and clipping, and distinguish the core GSPO loss reproduced here from a complete training reproduction.

Foundations & optimization
09

OPSD

Distill from self-generated trajectories

Study self-distillation with a fixed step-0 teacher and trajectories sampled by the student, including the training loop and mathematical reasoning results.

Distillation & self-learning
10

AgentOPSD

Assign credit to each interaction turn

Use a skill-guided self-teacher to provide turn-level learning signals, then examine multi-turn agent training and paired evaluation in ALFWorld.

Multimodal & frontier work
11

Search-R1

Learn to search while reasoning

Train multi-turn search with the official DeepSeek Search API or Wikipedia, and compare Base with the 30-step checkpoint using fixed evaluation questions.

Tools & environments
12

ReTool

Make Python part of the reasoning process

Connect a local Python sandbox and study reinforcement learning with interleaved reasoning and code execution, including rollout handling and results.

Tools & environments
13

ALFWorld

Train an agent to complete household tasks

Train a household agent in a real TextWorld environment, with long trajectories, environment feedback, group-relative advantages and evaluation notes.

Tools & environments
14

TEMPO

Learn long tasks through shorter trajectory segments

Explore macro-step optimization and a generative critic in ALFWorld, with clear boundaries between the public TEMPO description and this reproduction.

Multimodal & frontier work
15

Spec-o3

Search the sky with reinforcement learning

Move from SFT to GRPO for astronomical candidate review, interleaving spectrum images, reasoning and tools with explicit evaluation settings.

Multimodal & frontier work
16

Tournament-GRPO

Put research reports through a tournament

Compare research reports for the same query in tournaments, turn wins into GRPO rewards, and examine a 20-step PyTRIO run with independent evaluation.

Tools & environments

New here? Use the learning path → to find your starting point.

Open code. Real experiments. Honest limitations.