AI Knowledge Hub

Training & Fine-tuning

Techniques for adapting and optimizing large language models

Fine-tuning Techniques

LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)

Efficient fine-tuning by training only low-rank decomposition matrices


Benefits:
Memory efficient
Fast training
Multiple adapters
Best for:

Task-specific adaptation with limited compute resources

Knowledge Distillation

Transfer knowledge from large teacher model to smaller student model


Benefits:
Model compression
Faster inference
Maintained performance
Best for:

Creating smaller, deployable versions of large models

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

Training models to align with human preferences using reinforcement learning


Benefits:
Better alignment
Safer outputs
Human-preferred responses
Best for:

Improving model behavior and safety for deployment

Prompt Tuning

Learning optimal prompts rather than updating model parameters


Benefits:
Parameter efficient
Task-specific
No model modification
Best for:

Adapting frozen models to specific tasks

Fine-tuning Process

Data Preparation

Clean, format, and prepare training data

Base Model Selection

Choose appropriate pre-trained model

Hyperparameter Setup

Configure learning rate, batch size, epochs

Training Process

Execute training with monitoring

Evaluation

Assess model performance on validation set

Deployment

Deploy fine-tuned model to production

Training Considerations
Data Quality
  • High-quality, relevant training data

  • Proper data cleaning and preprocessing

  • Balanced dataset representation

Computational Resources
  • GPU memory requirements

  • Training time considerations

  • Cost optimization strategies

Monitoring
  • Loss tracking and validation metrics

  • Overfitting detection

  • Early stopping criteria

Best Practices
Start Small

Begin with smaller models and datasets to validate your approach

Hyperparameter Tuning

Systematically experiment with learning rates and batch sizes

Evaluation Strategy

Use multiple metrics and human evaluation when possible

Version Control

Track experiments, model versions, and training configurations