Continuous batching for GRPO, now in TRL

Continuous batching has been introduced as a significant improvement for transformers, specifically in the context of GRPO in TRL, aiming to enhance speed and memory efficiency during training and generation tasks. This advancement provides an in-process solution that fills the gap between the default generate() function and vLLM, eliminating the need for a separate inference engine and weight synchronization between model copies. By using a single flag in the GRPOConfig, users can leverage transformers directly with continuous batching to achieve faster and more resource-efficient rollouts, particularly beneficial for large generation batches with variable completion lengths. Benchmarking on an A100 80GB with Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct demonstrates notable performance improvements, with continuous batching outperforming the default at higher N values. This method is currently text-only and requires transformers version 5.8.0 or later, with ongoing developments promising further enhancements in performance and functionality.

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