Turning Database Grading into RL Rewards: Post-Training Agents with ThinkingBox
Microsoft and Hugging Face released ThinkingBox-Training on GitHub, turning executable checks of final database states into rewards for agent post-training. After 50 GRPO steps on 187 tasks outside ThinkingBox-Bench, Qwen3.8-27B’s average benchmark success rose from 51.70% to 60.78%, and tasks passed on all 20 attempts increased from 38 to 107, while tasks solved at least once fell from 453 to 446. The release includes task selection, rollout, reward, and Verl integration code; the reported run’s private training pool is not included.

Why it matters
Selecting tasks that sometimes succeed under the base policy offers a transferable way to generate contrasting RL rewards while reducing rollouts that provide no task reward advantage.














