Mastering Agentic Techniques: AI Agent Customization

A comprehensive guide to nine techniques for customizing AI agents, ranging from prompt engineering and RAG to supervised fine-tuning, DPO, RLHF, RLVR, and GRPO. Each technique is explained with how it works, when to use it, and its limitations. The post also outlines a multistage customization pipeline (prompt engineering → SDG → SFT → RLVR/DPO → evaluation) and provides criteria for choosing the right approach based on task characteristics, available resources, and project maturity. NVIDIA NeMo tools are highlighted throughout as the recommended implementation stack.