A fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1. This repo is a work in progress, let's build it together!
Table of Contents
1. Overview
2. Plan of attack
3. Installation
4. Training models
- SFT
- GRPO
5. Evaluating models
6. Reproducing Deepseek's evaluation results
7. Data generation
- Generate data from a smol distilled R1 model
- Generate data from DeepSeek-R1
8. Contributing
The goal of this repo is to build the missing pieces of the R1 pipeline such that everybody can reproduce and build on top of it. The project is simple by design and mostly consists of:
src/open_r1: contains the scripts to train models as well as generate synthetic data:grpo.py: trains a model with GRPO on a given dataset.sft.py: performs a simple SFT of a model on a dataset.generate.py: generates synthetic data from a model using Distilabel.Makefile: contains easy-to-run commands for each step in the R1 pipeline leveraging the scripts above.We will use the DeepSeek-R1 tech report as a guide, which can roughly be broken down into three main steps:
Step 3: show we can go from base model to RL-tuned via multi-stage training.

[!CAUTION] Libraries rely on CUDA 12.4. If you see errors related to segmentation faults, double check the version your system is running with
nvcc --version.
To run the code in this project, first, create a Python virtual environment using e.g. uv.
To install uv, follow the UV Installation Guide.
[!NOTE] As a shortcut, run
make installto setup development libraries (spelled out below). Afterwards, if everything is setup correctly you can try out the Open-R1 models.
uv venv openr1 --python 3.11 && source openr1/bin/activate && uv pip install --upgrade pip
[!TIP] For Hugging Face cluster users, add
export UV_LINK_MODE=copyto your.bashrcto suppress cache warnings fromuv
Next, install vLLM and FlashAttention:
uv pip install vllm==0.8.5.post1
uv pip install setuptools && uv pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation
This will also install PyTorch v2.6.0 and it is very important to use this version since the vLLM binaries are compiled for it. You can then install the remaining dependencies for your specific use case via pip install -e .[LIST OF MODES]. For most contributors, we recommend:
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
Next, log into your Hugging Face and Weights and Biases accounts as follows:
huggingface-cli login
wandb login
Finally, check whether your system has Git LFS installed so that you can load and push models/datasets to the Hugging Face Hub:
git-lfs --version
If it isn't installed, run:
sudo apt-get install git-lfs
[!NOTE] The training commands below are configured for a node of 8 x H100s (80GB). For different hardware and topologies, you may need to tune the batch size and number of gradient accumulation steps.
We support training models with either DDP or DeepSpeed (ZeRO-2 and ZeRO-3). For example, to perform SFT on a dataset distilled from DeepSeek-R1 with reasoning traces such as open-r1/Mixture-of-Thoughts, run:
# Train via command line
accelerate launch --config_file=recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--model_name_or_path open-r1/Qwen2.5-Math-7B-RoPE-300k \
--dataset_name open-r1/Mixture-of-Thoughts \
--dataset_config all \
--eos_token '<|im_end|>' \
--learning_rate 4.0e-5 \
--num_train_epochs 5 \
--max_seq_length 32768 \
--per_device_train_batch_size 2 \
--gradient_checkpointing \
--bf16 \
--use_liger_kernel \
--output_dir data/OpenR1-Distill-7B
# Train via YAML config
accelerate launch --config_file recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--config recipes/OpenR1-Distill-7B/sft/config_distill.yaml
Currently, the following tasks are supported:
sftgrpo[!TIP] If you scale up/down the number of GPUs, we recommend also scaling up the per-device batch size or number of gradient accumulation steps to keep the global batch size constant.
By default, these scripts will push each model to your Hugging Face Hub username, i.e. {username}/{model_name}-{task}. You can override the parameters in each YAML config by appending them to the command as follows:
# Change the base model to a smaller variant
accelerate launch --config_file recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--config recipes/OpenR1-Distill-7B/sft/config_distill.yaml \
--model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B-Base \
--hub_model_id OpenR1-Distill-0.6B \
--output_dir data/OpenR1-Distill-0.6B
If you also wish to override the Weights and Biases default settings, you can do so as follows:
accelerate launch --config_file recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--config recipes/OpenR1-Distill-7B/sft/config_distill.yaml
--wandb_entity huggingface --wandb_project open-r1 --run_name Qwen2.5-1.5B-GRPO
🚨 WARNING 🚨
Most base models like meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B do not have a chat template, so we set ChatML as the default during training. However, for Qwen base models like Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B, a chat template is pre-defined in the tokenizer, so the EOS token must be set accordingly, e.g.
# Align EOS token with chat template for Qwen base models
accelerate launch --config_file=recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--model_name_or_path Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B \
+ --eos_token '<|im_end|>'
--dataset_name open-r1/Mixture-of-Thoughts \
--dataset_config all \
--learning_rate 4.0e-5 \
--num_train_epochs 1 \
--max_seq_length 32768 \
--per_device_train_batch_size 16 \
--gradient_checkpointing \
--bf16 \
--use_liger_kernel \
--output_dir data/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Open-R1-Distill
If you wish to use a custom chat template (e.g. Llama or Gemma), then the chat template and associated EOS token must be provided:
# Align EOS token with custom chat template
accelerate launch --config_file=recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml src/open_r1/sft.py \
--model_name_or_path meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B \
+ --chat_template "$(cat llama_chat_template.jinja)" \
+ --eos_token '<|eot_id|>' \
--dataset_name open-r1/Mixture-of-Thoughts \
--dataset_config all \
--learning_rate 4.0e-5 \
--num_train_epochs 1 \
--max_seq_length 32768 \
--per_device_train_batch_size 16 \
--gradient_checkpointing \
--bf16 \
--use_liger_kernel \
--output_dir data/Llama-3.2-1B-Open-R1-Distill
We provide a recipe to reproduce the reasoning capabilities of deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, starting from the same base model. To do so, run:
ACCELERATE_LOG_LEVEL=info accelerate launch --config_file recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml \
src/open_r1/sft.py \
--config recipes/OpenR1-Distill-7B/sft/config_distill.yaml
The result will be a model like open-r1/OpenR1-Distill-7B, with the following downstream performance:
| Model | AIME 2024 | MATH-500 | GPQA Diamond | LiveCodeBench v5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenR1-Distill-7B | 52.7 | 89.0 | 52.8 | 39.4 |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B | 51.3 | 93.5 | 52.4 | 37.4 |
You can adjust the YAML config to train on a different base model or dataset.
We use TRL's vLLM backend to scale training to large models across multiple nodes. For single-node training of smol models across 8 GPUs, use vllm_mode="colocate" to run vLLM in the same process as the training script:
ACCELERATE_LOG_LEVEL=info \
accelerate launch --config_file recipes/accelerate_configs/zero3.yaml \
src/open_r1/grpo.py --config recipes/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/grpo/config_demo.yaml \
--vllm_mode colocate
[!WARNING] The chat template used in the distilled DeepSeek models omits the contents of the reasoning block within the
<think>and</think>tags. It also prefills the assistant response with<think>which interferes with the format reward function. To handle that, it is important to override the chat template as done in e.g. recipes/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/grpo/config_demo.yaml.
For multi-node training on N+1 nodes, with 1 node running the vLLM server and N nodes running training, we provide an example Slurm script. For example, to run the above example on 1+1 nodes with data parallelism, run:
sbatch --nodes=2 slurm/train.slurm --model Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct --task grpo --config demo --accelerator zero2 --dp 8 --tp 1
See the Launching jobs on a Slurm cluster section for more details.
We provide support to filter datasets by generating and computing pass rate on veriable tasks, see this README
We provide a code reward function for executing code generated by the policy during training. Currently, this reward function targets code contests like Codeforces, where solutions are executed against a set of test cases and the overall success rate is returned as the final reward. To ensure safe execution, we support multiple sandbox providers:
To use the code reward function, first install the necessary dependencies:
uv pip install -e '.[code]'
To use E2B sandboxes, create a .env file and add your E2B API token:
E2B_API_KEY="e2b_xxx"
To use Morph, first install the morphcloud package:
pip install morphcloud
Then add your Morph API token to the .env file:
MORPH_API_KEY="YOUR_MORPH_API_KEY"
To specify which provider to use, add the provider_type parameter in your configuration:
# For E2B
provider_type: e2b
# For Morph
provider_type: morph
Make sure your dataset contains a verification_info column with the following schema (adopted from PrimeIntellect's excellent datasets of verifiable problems):
```python { "language": "python", # Morph supports more languages including C++, Java, etc. "test_cases": [ { "input": "4\n4\n0001\n1000\n0011\n0
$ claude mcp add open-r1 \
-- python -m otcore.mcp_server <graph>