What Broke & Why: Practical Lessons from Reinforcement Learning Post-Training

arXiv:2611.10844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an important way to improve how language models reason, solve problems, and use tools. But getting it to work in practice is not always straightforward. Training can fail because a model receives no useful reward, learns to exploit the reward system, stops exploring, or appears to improve when the evaluation itself is misleading. In this book, we give a practical introduction to reinforcement learning post-training for language models, focusing on what works, what fails, and why. We begin with the foundations of post-training, explain GRPO and the training loop step by step, and then follow five training programs covering math reasoning, search agents, training stability, mixture-of-experts models, and software engineering tasks. Each program shows the problems encountered, the changes made, and the lessons learned. The book also examines what reinforcement learning actually changes inside a model. The remaining chapters provide a practical reference for reward design, evaluation, training tool-using agents, debugging common failures, reproducibility, rollout engines, and hardware. Written for researchers and practitioners working with open models, the book aims to help readers understand how to train models, recognize when something goes wrong, and decide what to try next.