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
Memory Optimization during Training
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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- Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost, Tianqi Chen, Bing Xu, Chiyuan Zhang, Carlos Guestrin, 2016 arXiv preprint, Vol. 48 (arXiv) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1604.06174 - Introduces gradient checkpointing as a method to reduce memory consumption by recomputing activations during the backward pass.
- Mixed-Precision Training, Paulius Micikevicius, Sharan Narang, Jonah Alben, Gregory Diamos, Erich Elsen, David Garcia, Boris Ginsburg, Michael Houston, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Ganesh Venkatesh, Hao Wu, 2018 ICLR DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1710.03740 - Presents the foundational techniques and benefits of automatic mixed-precision training using FP16 and loss scaling.
- Automatic Mixed Precision package - torch.cuda.amp, PyTorch Development Team, 2025 (PyTorch Foundation) - Documentation for PyTorch's Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP) utilities, including support for FP16 and BF16.
- Optimize Your Training For Memory Efficiency, Hugging Face, 2024 - Hugging Face Accelerate guide on memory optimization strategies for training large models, covering gradient accumulation, gradient checkpointing, and mixed precision.
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