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feat(evaluator): pre-flight Gym config with gym env validate and take overrides as a dict - #1203

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feat(evaluator): pre-flight Gym config with gym env validate and take overrides as a dict#1203
SandyChapman merged 3 commits into
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@SandyChapman SandyChapman commented Aug 10, 2026

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Summary

Makes the Gym runner's preconditions checkable before a run commits to anything. It now runs gym env validate before starting servers, takes env_overrides as a nested dict instead of pre-serialized Hydra strings, and stops Gym littering the caller's working directory.

Before, a config mistake surfaced only after a Ray cluster and several uvicorn servers were up, as a readiness timeout of up to startup_timeout_s (240 s) whose message said nothing about the cause. Now it fails in about a second with Gym's own diagnosis.

Follows #1196 (merged). Rebased onto main; the two commits here are the whole diff.

Related Issue

Tracked in Linear as AALGO-485. No GitHub issue.

Changes

  • Validate before starting. _run_two_step runs gym env validate with the identical selection arguments it then passes to gym env start, raising with Gym's report on rejection. Gym does not publish what configuration an environment requires — the typed *ResourcesServerConfig classes cover behavioural knobs, while model wiring lives in per-environment YAML under names that vary — so validate is the only way to find out short of running. Bounded at 120 s; output captured to gym_validate.log in the run's work dir.
  • env_overrides is now dict[str, Any], flattened to Hydra's ++a.b=1 grammar at invocation. Hydra's grammar is typed, so serialization is not str(): unquoted, true parses as a bool, null as None, 1.5 as a float, a,b as a ChoiceSweep, and A[B does not parse at all. Strings are single-quoted (only ' escaped — Hydra does not decode \\ inside quotes), and a value ending in a backslash raises rather than emitting something unparseable. Interpolations survive quoting, so ${policy_base_url} still resolves. Redaction moved with it and matches on the full dotted path, so nesting cannot hide a credential behind an innocuous leaf name.
  • hydra.run.dir redirected under the run's work dir. Gym is a Hydra app and writes a timestamped run directory per invocation, defaulting to outputs/<date>/<time>/ under the current directory; since the subprocesses inherit this process's cwd so Gym can find env.yaml, the default littered wherever the caller ran from. Applies to every Gym entry point, gym list included.
  • Corrected the missing-CLI message. It told the user to install Gym into this environment, which cannot work: Gym imports Ray at module load, and nemo-platform excludes Ray by constraint over an unfixed CVE (root pyproject.toml, "ray; sys_platform == 'never'"). Verified — pip install nemo-gym here yields ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'ray' on every gym invocation. It now says to install Gym in its own environment and put that bin on PATH.
  • _selection_args extracted from _run_two_step, so "validate and start receive identical arguments" is a property a test can assert rather than a comment to trust.
  • New test_gym_environment_coverage.py — drives the real CLI against five environments spanning Gym's dependency and wiring categories.
  • Nine unit tests in test_gym_runtime.py for the pre-flight and override serialization.

Type of Change

  • Code change (feature, bug fix, or refactor)
  • Code change with documentation updates
  • Documentation only
  • Contributor tooling or automation
  • CI, build, or test infrastructure

Quality Gates

Verification

  • Pull request title follows the repository's Conventional Commit format
  • Every commit includes an appropriate Signed-off-by: trailer
  • uv run pre-commit run -a passes, or any blocked checks are identified below
  • Targeted tests pass, or tests are marked not applicable above
  • No secrets, API keys, or credentials are included
pytest packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/ -q  → 573 passed, 10 skipped
ruff check packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/                  → All checks passed!
ruff format --check packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/         → 230 files already formatted
ty check .../agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py          → All checks passed!
make vendor                                              → vendored copy in sync

The new tests were checked by mutation, not by coverage percentage. Deleting the hydra.run.dir line fails only test_selection_redirects_hydra_output_under_the_run_work_dir; dropping the None → "null" branch fails only test_hydra_scalars_use_hydra_spellings_not_python_ones. _validate_config is driven against a stub gym that records its argv and exits how the test wants, so it needs no Gym install and covers both the success path (argv plus log written) and the failure path (raises carrying Gym's report).

The coverage sweep against a real Gym install (Gym in its own venv, its bin on PATH):

  mcqa[baseline]              validate ✓
  gpqa_diamond[tiny]          validate ✓
  gdpval[heavy-cpu-judge]     validate ✓  (with the five overrides it requires)
  legal_agent_bench[docker]   validate ✓
  wmt_translation[gpu]        validate ✓  (validate needs no GPU — only its rollout does)
  all five rollout tests      skipped — NEMO_GYM_POLICY_BASE_URL not set

That sweep is what found the gdpval case: it registers its resources-server as gdpval_resources_server, not gdpval, so bind_resources_server's assumption that the two names match does not hold. Deliberately not worked around in the runner — guessing would make it wrong for the environments that do follow the convention. The test records what a caller has to supply instead.

Known limitation

The rollout path has not been run end to end. Every gym env validate invocation is exercised, and the runner code around it is unit-tested, but validate → env start → eval run as a sequence has never executed here: the rollout tests need a reachable model endpoint and skip without one. A stub endpoint that removes that dependency is the next piece of work, tracked under AALGO-485.

Pre-commit

10 of 11 hooks pass, run with the repository-pinned toolchain (uv 0.9.14 installed to a temp dir, mise trust + mise install for pnpm 10.34.5). That includes Run uv lock with platform uv, which I had previously reported as blocked — it was my toolchain, not the change.

The remaining failure is Run UI lint-staged: Command "lint-staged" not found, because this worktree has never run pnpm install in web/. No web/ files in this diff, so the hook has nothing of mine to lint.

Worth noting the pin conflict this surfaces: that hook requires uv 0.9.14, while NeMo-Gym's pyproject.toml sets required-version = ">=0.9.30". One uv install cannot satisfy both, which matters because this runner shells out to Gym.

Summary by CodeRabbit

  • New Features

    • Added bounded pre-flight validation for Gym environments before execution.
    • Configuration overrides now support nested mappings with typed values.
    • Hydra run outputs are redirected into the active run workspace.
    • Credential-like values are automatically redacted from run metadata.
    • Added clearer installation guidance for Gym environments using Ray dependencies.
  • Bug Fixes

    • Improved handling and reporting of invalid configurations and missing Gym executables.
  • Tests

    • Expanded coverage across CPU, Docker, GPU, and end-to-end Gym environments.

@github-actions github-actions Bot added the feat label Aug 10, 2026
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman force-pushed the gym-config-preflight/schapman branch 2 times, most recently from 5200b58 to ae09337 Compare August 10, 2026 17:12
Base automatically changed from gym-bin-resolution/schapman to main August 10, 2026 18:04
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman force-pushed the gym-config-preflight/schapman branch from b7a08db to b47e15f Compare August 10, 2026 18:43
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Suite Lines Covered Line Rate Branch Rate
Unit Tests 33171/41884 79.2% 64.0%
Integration Tests 19381/39786 48.7% 20.9%

@SandyChapman
SandyChapman marked this pull request as ready for review August 10, 2026 19:23
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman requested review from a team as code owners August 10, 2026 19:23
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Review Change Stack

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

Gym runtime execution now uses nested environment overrides, validates configuration before startup, redirects Hydra output, and resolves Gym from a separate PATH environment. Tests cover representative environments and conditional end-to-end rollouts.

Changes

Gym runtime flow

Layer / File(s) Summary
Structured selection and override handling
packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py, plugins/nemo-evaluator/..., packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_runtime.py, packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_run_metadata.py, packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/examples/gym/README.md
env_overrides now uses nested mappings. The runtime renders and flattens overrides into Hydra arguments, redirects Hydra output, and recursively redacts credential paths.
Validation before Gym startup
packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py, packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_runtime.py
The runtime runs gym env validate with shared selection arguments, writes gym_validate.log, enforces a 120-second timeout, and reuses the arguments for gym env start.
Environment matrix and execution coverage
packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_environment_coverage.py
Coverage tests define representative Gym environments, check prerequisites, validate configurations offline, and run conditional end-to-end evaluations.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
  participant AgentEvaluator
  participant GymRuntime
  participant GymCLI
  participant GymAgentTaskRunner
  AgentEvaluator->>GymRuntime: configure environment and nested overrides
  GymRuntime->>GymCLI: run gym env validate
  GymCLI-->>GymRuntime: return validation result and diagnostics
  GymRuntime->>GymCLI: run gym env start
  GymCLI-->>GymRuntime: provide running environment
  AgentEvaluator->>GymAgentTaskRunner: execute evaluation tasks
  GymAgentTaskRunner-->>AgentEvaluator: return completed trials and scores
Loading

Possibly related PRs

Suggested labels: breaking

Suggested reviewers: arpitsardhana, ngoncharenko

Mergeability Score: 🟡 Moderate · up to 57f19

Changing env_overrides from a list to a dictionary may cause existing clients or queued evaluation jobs to be rejected, preventing runs from starting. Compatibility handling or an explicit contract migration is needed before merge.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name Status Explanation Resolution
Docstring Coverage ⚠️ Warning Docstring coverage is 51.61% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.
✅ Passed checks (4 passed)
Check name Status Explanation
Description Check ✅ Passed Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check ✅ Passed The title clearly summarizes the two main changes: Gym pre-flight validation and dictionary-based environment overrides.
Linked Issues check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check ✅ Passed Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
✨ Finishing Touches 💡 1
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  • Create PR with unit tests
  • Commit unit tests in branch gym-config-preflight/schapman

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Actionable comments posted: 4

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents
Verify each finding against current code. Fix only still-valid issues, skip the
rest with a brief reason, keep changes minimal, and validate.

Inline comments:
In
`@packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py`:
- Around line 580-588: Update the subprocess creation in the gym validation flow
to pass start_new_session=True, ensuring _terminate targets only the validation
process group and its descendants. Add a timeout test using a forking stub to
verify cleanup does not signal the inherited SDK process group.
- Around line 126-140: Update _hydra_scalar to quote and escape string values
using Hydra override grammar, including strings containing reserved literals,
commas, brackets, quotes, or backslashes; apply the same serialization
recursively to list and tuple elements while preserving None and boolean
spellings. Avoid json.dumps as the escaping mechanism, and add coverage for
reserved values, quotes, backslashes, commas, and bracketed strings.

In
`@packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_environment_coverage.py`:
- Around line 281-282: In the validation test around _gym_cli, replace
_require_environment(gym, case) with _environment_dir(case) so gym env validate
runs without Docker or GPU prerequisite skips. Keep _require_environment
unchanged for the end-to-end test.
- Line 62: Install and use the repository-pinned toolchain, including uv and
pnpm 10.34.5 instead of the currently available pnpm 11.20.0, then run the full
pre-commit suite with `uv run pre-commit run -a`.
🪄 Autofix

Fix all unresolved CodeRabbit comments on this PR:

  • Push a commit to this branch (recommended)
  • Create a new PR with the fixes

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Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Enterprise

Run ID: f227dd5d-a481-468c-8a63-182eb4ce6ffe

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between f365be9 and b47e15f.

⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (1)
  • sdk/python/nemo-platform/src/nemo_platform/beta/evaluator/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py is excluded by !sdk/**
📒 Files selected for processing (4)
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_environment_coverage.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_runtime.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_run_metadata.py

Comment thread packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_environment_coverage.py Outdated
SandyChapman added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 10, 2026
…ess group

Three review findings on #1203, all confirmed against the real behaviour.

**Hydra's grammar is typed, so unquoted strings were being retyped.** Checked
against `hydra.core.override_parser`: `true` parses as a bool, `null` as `None`,
`1.5` as a float, `a,b` as a *ChoiceSweep*, and `A[B` fails to parse at all. A
caller writing `{"k": "true"}` meaning the string got a boolean. Strings are now
single-quoted, which round-trips all of those — verified by generating overrides
through `_flatten_overrides` and parsing them back with Hydra itself: thirteen
values, all recovering their original value *and* type.

Only `'` is escaped. Hydra does not decode `\\` inside a quoted value, so
escaping backslashes doubles them; they pass through raw. A value ending in a
backslash cannot be expressed at all — it escapes the closing quote — so that
raises rather than emitting something unparseable.

**`gym env validate` ran in our own process group.** `_terminate` resolves the
group with `os.getpgid` and signals it with `killpg`, and `env start` / `eval
run` both pass `start_new_session=True` — validate did not. A validate timeout
would therefore have signalled the SDK's own process group. It now leads its own
session like the other two.

**The validate test skipped on execution prerequisites.** It called
`_require_environment`, which gates on Docker and a GPU — neither of which
`gym env validate` needs, since it starts nothing. `wmt_translation`'s config
went unvalidated on any machine without an NVIDIA card, which is the whole
fleet until the GPU runner lands, discarding exactly the offline coverage this
test exists for. It now requires only the environment itself; the end-to-end
test keeps the full prerequisite check. The sweep goes from four validated
environments to five.

Signed-off-by: Sandy Chapman <schapman@nvidia.com>
SandyChapman added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 13, 2026
…ess group

Four review findings on #1203, all confirmed against the real behaviour.

**Hydra's grammar is typed, so unquoted strings were being retyped.** Checked
against `hydra.core.override_parser`: `true` parses as a bool, `null` as `None`,
`1.5` as a float, `a,b` as a *ChoiceSweep*, and `A[B` fails to parse at all. A
caller writing `{"k": "true"}` meaning the string got a boolean. Strings are now
single-quoted, which round-trips all of those — verified by generating overrides
through `_flatten_overrides` and parsing them back with Hydra itself: thirteen
values, all recovering their original value *and* type.

Only `'` is escaped. Hydra does not decode `\\` inside a quoted value, so
escaping backslashes doubles them; they pass through raw. A value ending in a
backslash cannot be expressed at all — it escapes the closing quote — so that
raises rather than emitting something unparseable.

**A dict reached through a list fell through to `str()`.** Jash's question, and
it holds: `_flatten_overrides` recurses into a mapping that is a value, so a
mapping inside a *container* — `{"a": [{"b": 1}]}` — never got there and was
serialized by Python's repr. Hydra rejects that outright, since its `dictKey`
rule has no quoted form: `++a=[{'b': 1}]` is a parse error. Mappings are now
rendered inline as `{key:value,...}`, recursing through `_hydra_scalar` so the
typed spellings hold at any depth.

Bare keys are what the grammar allows, which leaves them to the lexer, and it
types them: `{true:1}` keys on the boolean `True`, `{1.5:1}` on a float. Worse,
`{b:c:1}` parses as `{'b': 'c:1'}` — reinterpreted, and silently. Keys are
therefore restricted to a conservative shape and anything else raises, rather
than keying a config on something the caller did not write.

An empty mapping was dropped on the same path: recursing into it emits no
leaves, so `{"a": {}}` set nothing and the run silently kept the config's own
value. It now emits `++a={}`, which clears the subtree.

**Redaction did not walk lists.** `_redact_env_overrides` recursed only into
mappings that were direct values, so `{"models": [{"api_key": "sk-..."}]}`
reached `RunnerInfo.config` — persisted into the run bundle — in the clear. The
list index contributes no path segment: what marks a value as a credential is
the key it sits under, not where in a list it falls. A credential-shaped key
still wins over descending into it, so `{"api_keys": [...]}` redacts wholesale.

**`gym env validate` ran in our own process group.** `_terminate` resolves the
group with `os.getpgid` and signals it with `killpg`, and `env start` / `eval
run` both pass `start_new_session=True` — validate did not. A validate timeout
would therefore have signalled the SDK's own process group. It now leads its own
session like the other two.

**The validate test skipped on execution prerequisites.** It called
`_require_environment`, which gates on Docker and a GPU — neither of which
`gym env validate` needs, since it starts nothing. `wmt_translation`'s config
went unvalidated on any machine without an NVIDIA card, which is the whole
fleet until the GPU runner lands, discarding exactly the offline coverage this
test exists for. It now requires only the environment itself; the end-to-end
test keeps the full prerequisite check. The sweep goes from four validated
environments to five.

The container serialization is verified the same way as the quoting: emitted
overrides parsed back with Hydra, checking key and value survive across
dicts-in-lists, backslashes, embedded quotes, interpolation, and the empty
dict. Each new test was mutation-checked — dropping the empty-mapping guard,
the mapping branch, or the list walk fails those tests and nothing else.

Signed-off-by: Sandy Chapman <schapman@nvidia.com>
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman force-pushed the gym-config-preflight/schapman branch from b1ab1d3 to 8dab29c Compare August 13, 2026 16:00
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman enabled auto-merge August 13, 2026 16:02
…ke overrides as a dict

Three changes to the Gym runner, all about making its preconditions checkable
before a run commits to anything.

**Validate before starting.** `_run_two_step` now runs `gym env validate` with
the identical selection arguments it is about to pass to `gym env start`, and
fails with Gym's own report if the config is rejected. Gym does not publish what
configuration an environment requires — the typed `*ResourcesServerConfig`
classes cover behavioural knobs, while model wiring lives in each environment's
YAML under names that vary per environment — so validate is the only way to find
out short of running. It merges configs, flags, and overrides and reports unset
`???` values, bad paths, and dangling cross-references without Ray and without
starting a server, in about a second.

The alternative is what we had: a config mistake surfaces after a Ray cluster and
several uvicorn servers are up, as a readiness timeout of up to
`startup_timeout_s` (240s) whose message says nothing about the cause. Sweeping
five environments found two real problems this way in under a minute, one of them
in this runner: `gdpval` registers its resources-server as
`gdpval_resources_server`, not `gdpval`, so `bind_resources_server`'s assumption
that the two names match does not hold for it.

**`env_overrides` becomes a nested dict.** It was `list[str]` of pre-serialized
Hydra arguments. These runner configs become serialized job specs when Gym runs
as a governed platform job, and `"+a.b.c=${d}"` is a string that only means
something to Hydra, whereas `{"a": {"b": {"c": "${d}"}}}` is JSON. Flattening to
Hydra's grammar now happens at invocation. Leaf rendering is explicit about
`None` -> `null` and booleans -> `true`/`false`, which naive `str()` would have
written as the literal strings `"None"` and `"True"`; interpolations pass through
untouched. Redaction moved with it and now matches on the full dotted path, so
nesting cannot hide a credential behind an innocuous leaf name.

**Hydra run directories are redirected.** Gym is a Hydra app and writes a
timestamped run directory per invocation, defaulting to `outputs/<date>/<time>/`
under the current directory. Since the subprocesses inherit this process's cwd so
Gym can find `env.yaml`, the default littered whatever directory the caller ran
from. `hydra.run.dir` now points under the run's work dir. Note this applies to
every Gym entry point, `gym list` included.

Also corrects the missing-CLI message. It said `pip install nemo-gym` into this
environment, which cannot work: Gym imports Ray at module load and nemo-platform
excludes Ray by constraint over an unfixed CVE (root pyproject,
`"ray; sys_platform == 'never'"`). Gym has to live in its own environment with
its `bin` on PATH.

Adds `test_gym_environment_coverage.py`, which drives the real CLI against five
environments spanning Gym's dependency and wiring categories. Validate tests need
no endpoint or credentials and run anywhere Gym is installed; rollout tests skip
unless an endpoint is configured. `gdpval` carries the five overrides a caller
must supply for it, with the two Gym conventions it breaks written down rather
than papered over in the runner — guessing would make the runner wrong for the
environments that do follow the convention.

BREAKING CHANGE: `GymRuntimeConfig.env_overrides` is now `dict[str, Any]` of
nested config rather than `list[str]` of Hydra arguments. `["+a.b=1"]` becomes
`{"a": {"b": 1}}`.

Signed-off-by: Sandy Chapman <schapman@nvidia.com>
…zation

The pre-flight and the dict conversion shipped with no test touching them:
`_validate_config`, `_gym_executable`, and the Hydra redirect had zero
references, `_hydra_scalar` none, and nothing drove `_run_two_step`. What was
verified was the CLI equivalent — the coverage sweep shells out to
`gym env validate` itself — so the runner code that calls it had never run.

Extracts `_selection_args` out of `_run_two_step` so the property the comment
claims is testable: validate and start receive identical arguments. Adds nine
tests covering Hydra leaf spellings (`None` -> `null`, booleans, sequences,
interpolation pass-through), `++` forcing paths, the resources-server binding
both on and off, the Hydra redirect, `_validate_config`'s argv and log on
success and its raise-with-Gym's-report on failure, and `_gym_executable`'s
guidance when the CLI is absent.

`_validate_config` is driven against a stub `gym` that records its argv and
exits how the test wants, so it needs no Gym install.

Checked by mutation rather than by coverage: deleting the Hydra redirect fails
only the redirect test, and dropping the `None` -> `null` branch fails only the
scalar test.

Signed-off-by: Sandy Chapman <schapman@nvidia.com>
…ess group

Four review findings on #1203, all confirmed against the real behaviour.

**Hydra's grammar is typed, so unquoted strings were being retyped.** Checked
against `hydra.core.override_parser`: `true` parses as a bool, `null` as `None`,
`1.5` as a float, `a,b` as a *ChoiceSweep*, and `A[B` fails to parse at all. A
caller writing `{"k": "true"}` meaning the string got a boolean. Strings are now
single-quoted, which round-trips all of those — verified by generating overrides
through `_flatten_overrides` and parsing them back with Hydra itself: thirteen
values, all recovering their original value *and* type.

Only `'` is escaped. Hydra does not decode `\\` inside a quoted value, so
escaping backslashes doubles them; they pass through raw. A value ending in a
backslash cannot be expressed at all — it escapes the closing quote — so that
raises rather than emitting something unparseable.

**A dict reached through a list fell through to `str()`.** Jash's question, and
it holds: `_flatten_overrides` recurses into a mapping that is a value, so a
mapping inside a *container* — `{"a": [{"b": 1}]}` — never got there and was
serialized by Python's repr. Hydra rejects that outright, since its `dictKey`
rule has no quoted form: `++a=[{'b': 1}]` is a parse error. Mappings are now
rendered inline as `{key:value,...}`, recursing through `_hydra_scalar` so the
typed spellings hold at any depth.

Bare keys are what the grammar allows, which leaves them to the lexer, and it
types them: `{true:1}` keys on the boolean `True`, `{1.5:1}` on a float. Worse,
`{b:c:1}` parses as `{'b': 'c:1'}` — reinterpreted, and silently. Keys are
therefore restricted to a conservative shape and anything else raises, rather
than keying a config on something the caller did not write.

An empty mapping was dropped on the same path: recursing into it emits no
leaves, so `{"a": {}}` set nothing and the run silently kept the config's own
value. It now emits `++a={}`, which clears the subtree.

**Redaction did not walk lists.** `_redact_env_overrides` recursed only into
mappings that were direct values, so `{"models": [{"api_key": "sk-..."}]}`
reached `RunnerInfo.config` — persisted into the run bundle — in the clear. The
list index contributes no path segment: what marks a value as a credential is
the key it sits under, not where in a list it falls. A credential-shaped key
still wins over descending into it, so `{"api_keys": [...]}` redacts wholesale.

**`gym env validate` ran in our own process group.** `_terminate` resolves the
group with `os.getpgid` and signals it with `killpg`, and `env start` / `eval
run` both pass `start_new_session=True` — validate did not. A validate timeout
would therefore have signalled the SDK's own process group. It now leads its own
session like the other two.

**The validate test skipped on execution prerequisites.** It called
`_require_environment`, which gates on Docker and a GPU — neither of which
`gym env validate` needs, since it starts nothing. `wmt_translation`'s config
went unvalidated on any machine without an NVIDIA card, which is the whole
fleet until the GPU runner lands, discarding exactly the offline coverage this
test exists for. It now requires only the environment itself; the end-to-end
test keeps the full prerequisite check. The sweep goes from four validated
environments to five.

The container serialization is verified the same way as the quoting: emitted
overrides parsed back with Hydra, checking key and value survive across
dicts-in-lists, backslashes, embedded quotes, interpolation, and the empty
dict. Each new test was mutation-checked — dropping the empty-mapping guard,
the mapping branch, or the list walk fails those tests and nothing else.

**`GymRunnerTarget` still declared the old list shape.** Surfaced by CI on the
merge, not by this branch: the spec-side mirror landed on main after this branch
was cut, and it passes `env_overrides` straight through to `GymRuntimeConfig`.
Both sides merge cleanly and each is self-consistent, so the only symptom was a
pydantic `dict_type` error on a shape that had validated a moment earlier. The
field is now `dict[str, Any]` on the spec model too, the plugin's OpenAPI spec is
regenerated, and the resolve test pins the two sides to the same shape. The
example README described the old `+key=value` strings; updated.

Signed-off-by: Sandy Chapman <schapman@nvidia.com>
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman force-pushed the gym-config-preflight/schapman branch from 8dab29c to 57f1906 Compare August 13, 2026 16:38
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Actionable comments posted: 1

🤖 Prompt for all review comments with AI agents
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Inline comments:
In `@plugins/nemo-evaluator/openapi/openapi.yaml`:
- Around line 3780-3787: Preserve backward compatibility for the env_overrides
contract used by v2 requests and job responses: update the relevant schemas and
normalization path around Env Overrides to accept both the existing
list-of-strings form and the new nested object form, converting both to the
canonical internal representation. If dual acceptance is not possible, version
or migrate the contract before enabling the object-only schema.
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⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (1)
  • sdk/python/nemo-platform/src/nemo_platform/beta/evaluator/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py is excluded by !sdk/**
📒 Files selected for processing (8)
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/examples/gym/README.md
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_environment_coverage.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_runtime.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_run_metadata.py
  • plugins/nemo-evaluator/openapi/openapi.yaml
  • plugins/nemo-evaluator/src/nemo_evaluator/jobs/agent_spec.py
  • plugins/nemo-evaluator/tests/test_agent_evaluate.py
🚧 Files skipped from review as they are similar to previous changes (2)
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/src/nemo_evaluator_sdk/agent_eval/runtimes/gym_runtime.py
  • packages/nemo_evaluator_sdk/tests/agent_eval/test_gym_runtime.py

Comment thread plugins/nemo-evaluator/openapi/openapi.yaml
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman added this pull request to the merge queue Aug 13, 2026
Merged via the queue into main with commit e0c5ad6 Aug 13, 2026
55 checks passed
@SandyChapman
SandyChapman deleted the gym-config-preflight/schapman branch August 13, 2026 17:23
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