Post-Training & Alignment: Overview¶

When I first trained this transformer from scratch, it could continue text but it couldn't follow instructions or reason. That's what post-training fixes. This docs/ folder walks through the whole journey I built on top of the base model, every stage written from scratch in plain PyTorch (no trl, no peft, no transformers), trained on real public datasets, and runnable on a single GPU or scaled across multiple GPUs with DDP.

If you are new to LLM training internals, start with the LLM Foundations section before reading the stage pages. It explains the token shapes, decoder-only Transformer, attention masks, objectives, optimization loop, and generation mechanics that every later page relies on.

Two newer sections sit next to the pipeline:

Laptop Track: no GPU needed. Prepare TinyStories, train your own BPE tokenizer and a small model on a CPU in minutes, and generate stories with it.
Modern LLM: what changed between the 2017 Transformer and today's open models (RoPE, RMSNorm, SwiGLU, grouped-query and latent attention, Mixture of Experts, the KV cache), plus Muon, LoRA, the newer preference losses, the GRPO follow-ups and fast inference. Every stage of the pipeline can train either model.

Recommended reading order¶

Foundations first: Tokenization -> Transformer -> Attention -> Objectives -> Optimization -> Generation.
Then the full pipeline: Data -> Pretraining -> SFT -> Reward Model -> DPO -> PPO -> GRPO.
Finally run and inspect: Evaluation, Inference / Chat, and the command cheatsheet.
Then go modern: the modern model, optimizers, preference losses, RL for reasoning, LoRA and fast inference.

The pipeline mirrors how modern aligned/reasoning models are actually built:

Post-training pipeline

Mermaid source (live, editable)

flowchart TD
    PILE([The Pile<br/>9.8B tokens]):::data --> PRE{{Pretrain<br/>~400M base}}:::model
    PRE --> BASE[(base_pretrained.pt)]:::ckpt
    BASE --> SFT{{SFT<br/>Alpaca · Dolly · GSM8K}}:::model
    SFT --> SFTCK[(sft.pt)]:::ckpt
    SFTCK --> RM{{Reward Model<br/>Bradley-Terry}}:::rl
    SFTCK --> DPO{{DPO / ORPO / KTO<br/>preference}}:::rl
    RM --> RMCK[(reward.pt)]:::ckpt
    RMCK -->|reward signal| PPO{{PPO<br/>GAE + clip + KL}}:::rl
    SFTCK --> PPO
    SFTCK --> GRPO{{GRPO / RLVR<br/>group-relative}}:::rl
    PPO --> EVAL([GSM8K eval<br/>+ chat / inference]):::eval
    DPO --> EVAL
    GRPO --> EVAL
    classDef data fill:#d6ffd9,stroke:#27ae60,stroke-width:2px,color:#143d1a;
    classDef model fill:#ffe8a3,stroke:#d48806,stroke-width:2px,color:#5a3d00;
    classDef rl fill:#ffd9b3,stroke:#e67e22,stroke-width:2px,color:#6b3500;
    classDef ckpt fill:#eeeeee,stroke:#555555,stroke-width:2px,color:#222;
    classDef eval fill:#e8d6ff,stroke:#8e44ad,stroke-width:2px,color:#3d1a5a;

The stages, in order¶

#	Stage	What it teaches the model	Doc
1	Pretraining	language itself (next-token prediction on the Pile)	02_pretraining.md
2	SFT	to follow instructions & produce the `<think>/<answer>` format	03_sft.md
3	Reward Model	to score which answer humans prefer	04_reward_model.md
4	DPO / ORPO / KTO	to prefer better answers without an RL loop	05_dpo.md
5	PPO	to maximize a reward (RM or verifier) with the classic RLHF loop	06_ppo.md
6	GRPO / RLVR	to reason, using verifiable rewards (DeepSeek-R1 style)	07_grpo.md
	Data pipeline	how every dataset above is downloaded & preprocessed	01_data_pipeline.md
	Evaluation	how I measure GSM8K accuracy across all stages	08_evaluation.md
	Inference / chat	how to actually talk to any checkpoint	09_inference.md

The one design rule: wrap, don't rewrite¶

Everything here sits on top of the original Transformer. I changed the educational model in exactly one place: I added a forward_hidden method that returns the final hidden states the lm_head consumes. Every post-training head (a value head for PPO, a scalar reward head for the reward model) and every RL log-prob computation composes around that one method, so the from-scratch model you already understand stays intact.

Colour legend (used in every diagram in these docs)¶

🟩 data / corpus · 🟦 preprocessing · 🟦‍⬛ storage (HDF5 / JSONL) · 🟨 model / training loop · 🟧 RL / reward · 🟥 loss / objective · 🟪 evaluation · ⬜ checkpoint

Each diagram is a hand-drawn, colour-coded Mermaid sketch, pre-rendered to a PNG and embedded as an image (GitHub's live Mermaid doesn't reliably do look: handDrawn, and some viewers, e.g. the VS Code preview, block SVGs, so an embedded PNG shows everywhere). The editable Mermaid source sits in a collapsible "Mermaid source" block under each image. To regenerate the images after editing, see diagrams/README.md.

Run the whole thing¶

Once the base model has pretrained (02_pretraining.md), the entire chain is one script:

bash scripts/run_posttraining.sh          # SFT -> RM -> DPO -> PPO -> GRPO -> eval table

See POST_TRAINING.md for the condensed command reference.