Fine-tuning and Adapting Large Language Models
Chapter 1: Foundations of LLM Adaptation
Recap: Pre-trained Language Models and Transformers
The Need for Fine-tuning and Adaptation
Transfer Learning Paradigms in NLP
Architectural Considerations for Fine-tuning
Overview of Fine-tuning Approaches
Chapter 2: Data Preparation for Fine-tuning
Instruction Tuning Principles
Sourcing and Constructing Instruction Datasets
Formatting Data for Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT)
Domain Adaptation Data Requirements
Handling Data Scarcity and Imbalance
Data Augmentation Techniques for Text
Practice: Preparing an Instruction Tuning Dataset
Chapter 3: Full Parameter Fine-tuning
Mechanism of Full Fine-tuning
Setting up the Training Loop
Hyperparameter Tuning Strategies
Regularization Techniques to Prevent Overfitting
Managing Computational Resources
Checkpointing and Resuming Training
Hands-on Practical: Full Fine-tuning a Smaller LLM
Chapter 4: Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) Methods
Rationale for Parameter Efficiency
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)
Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA)
Adapter Modules
Prompt Tuning
Prefix Tuning
Comparison of PEFT Techniques
Implementation with Hugging Face PEFT Library
Hands-on Practical: Fine-tuning with LoRA
Hands-on Practical: Fine-tuning with QLoRA
Chapter 5: Advanced Fine-tuning Strategies
Multi-Task Fine-tuning
Sequential Adaptation and Continual Learning
Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting
Introduction to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
Reward Model Training
Policy Optimization with PPO
Challenges in Advanced Adaptation
Chapter 6: Evaluation and Analysis of Fine-tuned Models
Limitations of Standard NLP Metrics
Evaluating Instruction Following Capabilities
Assessing Factual Accuracy and Hallucinations
Bias and Fairness Assessment Techniques
Robustness Evaluation (Adversarial Attacks, OOD)
Model Calibration Assessment
Qualitative Analysis and Error Categorization
Human Evaluation Protocols
Practice: Analyzing Model Outputs for Errors
Chapter 7: Optimization and Deployment Considerations
Memory Optimization during Training
Accelerating Training with Distributed Strategies
Post-tuning Optimization: Quantization
Post-tuning Optimization: Pruning
Merging PEFT Adapters
Model Serialization and Packaging
Inference Serving Frameworks
Monitoring Fine-tuned Models in Production
Accelerating Training with Distributed Strategies
New · Open Source
Kerb - LLM Development Toolkit
Python toolkit for building production-ready LLM applications. Modular utilities for prompts, RAG, agents, structured outputs, and multi-provider support.
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- ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models, Samyam Rajbhandari, Cong Guo, Jeff Rasley, Shaden Smith, Yuxiong He, 2020 SC '20: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (IEEE) DOI: 10.1109/SC41405.2020.00070 - Introduces the ZeRO (Zero Redundancy Optimizer) family of techniques, a memory optimization for distributed training that partitions model states across data-parallel devices, enabling scaling to extremely large models.
- Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Raul Puri, Patrick LeGresley, Jared Casper, Bryan Catanzaro, 2019 arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.08053 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1909.08053 - Presents work on model parallelism for large language models, detailing tensor and pipeline parallelism strategies and their combination for training multi-billion parameter models efficiently.
- GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism, Yanping Huang, Youlong Cheng, Ankur Bapna, Orhan Firat, Mia Xu Chen, Dehao Chen, HyoukJoong Lee, Jiquan Ngiam, Quoc V. Le, Yonghui Wu, Zhifeng Chen, 2019 NeurIPS 2019 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1811.06965 - Introduces GPipe, an efficient pipeline parallelism strategy for training very large neural networks by partitioning layers across devices and using micro-batch scheduling to maximize hardware utilization.
torch.distributed.fsdp- PyTorch 2.3 documentation, PyTorch Development Team, 2022 - Official documentation for PyTorch's Fully Sharded Data Parallelism (FSDP), explaining its usage for memory-efficient training of large models by sharding model parameters, gradients, and optimizer states.
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