Notes from the dataset creator - tips for better fine-tuning

#1
by OwnedByDanes - opened

This is fantastic! Really glad to see someone actually shipping something with the corpus. A few thoughts that might help with the "works terribly" problem:

For a Usenet-flavored model, the comp.* and sci.* samples will give you much cleaner signal than alt.* — the alt hierarchy has a lot of noise and the writing style is all over the place. If you haven't already, try fine-tuning on just the comp-sample or sci-sample files and see if the output quality improves noticeably.

Also worth filtering by date if you can... the pre-1995 posts have a very distinct voice (longer, more technical, less conversational) compared to the late 90s material. Depending on which era you're going for, mixing those can confuse the model.

Keep iterating! The fact that you got a quantized GGUF running on ollama with downloads already is great progress. Happy to answer any questions about the data structure or content if it would help.

Owner

Thank you for your encouragement!

I must admit I don't really know what I'm doing, this is my first time tuning models or running any ML at all, and I'm learning as I go. I'll try your suggestions. One thing I still don't quite get is what's the "correct" format to give the data to feed the tuning process. This attempt uses the subject line as a sort of question and the body as an answer, which I'm guessing makes it more like reinforcement learning and less like the fine tuning we want here. Need to read up on this.

I'm hoping to find some time to give it another go soon, it's pretty impressive in any case to be able to play with this sort of algorithm, at this size, as a hobby :)

Sign up or log in to comment