Purpose

Guide the selection and execution of fine-tuning strategies for LLMs — from full fine-tuning to parameter-efficient methods (LoRA, QLoRA, prefix tuning) — using HuggingFace PEFT, TRL, and Transformers. Includes adapter configuration, quantization setup, data formatting, and evaluation.

When to use this skill

Use this skill when:

• adapting a pretrained LLM to a specific downstream task or domain
• choosing between full fine-tuning, LoRA, QLoRA, or prefix tuning
• configuring PEFT adapters, quantization, or training hyperparameters
• preparing instruction/input/output datasets for supervised fine-tuning
• evaluating whether fine-tuning improved performance over the base model

Do not use this skill when

• the task is prompt engineering or in-context learning without weight updates
• the goal is instruction-tuning on chat data (use

  instruction-tuning

  for SFT on conversations)
• the task is RLHF or DPO alignment (use

  preference-optimization

  )
• you have fewer than ~100 labeled examples (try few-shot prompting first)

Operating procedure

1. Decide tuning strategy. Full fine-tuning: updates all parameters, requires multi-GPU, best for large high-quality datasets (>50k examples). LoRA: trains low-rank adapters on attention projections, 10–100× fewer trainable params. QLoRA: loads base model in 4-bit, trains LoRA adapters in fp16, fits 65B models on a single 48GB GPU.
2. Configure LoRA adapter. Use PEFT:

   from peft import LoraConfig, get_peft_model
   lora_config = LoraConfig(
       r=16, lora_alpha=32,
       target_modules=["q_proj", "v_proj"],
       lora_dropout=0.05, bias="none", task_type="CAUSAL_LM"
   )
   model = get_peft_model(base_model, lora_config)
   

   For QLoRA, first quantize:

   BitsAndBytesConfig(load_in_4bit=True, bnb_4bit_quant_type="nf4", bnb_4bit_compute_dtype=torch.bfloat16)

   .
3. Prepare data. Format as

   {"instruction": "...", "input": "...", "output": "..."}

   or chat-template JSON. Ensure a held-out validation split (10–20%). Clean duplicates and filter low-quality examples.
4. Configure training. Use TRL's SFTTrainer:

   from trl import SFTTrainer, SFTConfig
   training_args = SFTConfig(
       output_dir="./output", num_train_epochs=3,
       per_device_train_batch_size=4, gradient_accumulation_steps=4,
       learning_rate=2e-4, lr_scheduler_type="cosine", warmup_ratio=0.03,
       bf16=True, logging_steps=10, save_strategy="epoch",
       max_seq_length=2048
   )
   trainer = SFTTrainer(model=model, args=training_args, train_dataset=dataset)
   

5. Evaluate. Track validation loss each epoch. Run task-specific metrics (accuracy, F1, ROUGE, pass@k). Compare against base model zero-shot and few-shot baselines. Check for catastrophic forgetting on a held-out general benchmark.
6. Merge and export. For LoRA:

   model.merge_and_unload()

   to produce a standalone model, or ship adapter weights separately for modularity.

Decision rules

• If prompt engineering achieves ≥90% of target quality, do not fine-tune — save compute.
• Use LoRA (r=8–64) as the default starting point; only go to full fine-tuning if LoRA plateaus.
• Use QLoRA when GPU VRAM is limited (≤24GB) and model is ≥13B parameters.
• Set learning rate to 2e-4 for LoRA, 1e-5 for full fine-tuning. Use cosine schedule with 3% warmup.
• Minimum dataset: ~500 examples for LoRA on focused tasks; ~5k for robust generalization.
• If validation loss increases for 2+ consecutive evaluations, stop training (early stopping).

Output requirements

1. Adapter config

   — LoRA rank, alpha, target modules, dropout, quantization config

2. Training config

   — learning rate, batch size, epochs, scheduler, gradient accumulation

3. Data spec

   — format, size, split ratios, preprocessing steps

4. Evaluation report

   — base model vs. fine-tuned on held-out set, with task-specific metrics

5. Exported artifacts

   — adapter weights or merged model, tokenizer, training logs

References

• LoRA: Hu et al., "Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models" (arXiv:2106.09685)
• QLoRA: Dettmers et al., "QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs" (arXiv:2305.14314)
• PEFT library: https://github.com/huggingface/peft
• TRL library: https://github.com/huggingface/trl
• BitsAndBytes: https://github.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes

Related skills

• instruction-tuning

• preference-optimization

• eval-dataset-design

• llm-creation

Failure handling

• If training loss does not decrease after 1 epoch, verify data formatting and check that labels are not masked entirely.
• If OOM occurs, reduce batch size, enable gradient checkpointing (

  model.gradient_checkpointing_enable()

  ), or switch to QLoRA.
• If fine-tuned model regresses on general tasks, reduce epochs, lower learning rate, or add general-domain data to the mix.