lora

Fine-Tuning with LoRA or QLoRA

This is an example of using MLX to fine-tune an LLM with low rank adaptation (LoRA) for a target task.¹ The example also supports quantized LoRA (QLoRA).² The example works with Llama and Mistral style models available on Hugging Face.

Tip

For a more fully featured LLM package, checkout MLX LM.

In this example we'll use the WikiSQL³ dataset to train the LLM to generate SQL queries from natural language. However, the example is intended to be general should you wish to use a custom dataset.

Contents

• Setup
  • Convert
• Run
  • Fine-tune
  • Evaluate
  • Generate
• Results
• Fuse and Upload
• Custom Data
• Memory Issues

Setup

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Convert

This step is optional if you want to quantize (for QLoRA) or change the default data type of a pre-existing model.

You convert models using the convert.py script. This script takes a Hugging Face repo as input and outputs a model directory (which you can optionally also upload to Hugging Face).

To make a 4-bit quantized model, run:

python convert.py --hf-path <hf_repo> -q

For example, the following will make a 4-bit quantized Mistral 7B and by default store it in mlx_model:

python convert.py --hf-path mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 -q

For more options run:

python convert.py --help

You can upload new models to the Hugging Face MLX Community by specifying --upload-name to convert.py.

Run

The main script is lora.py. To see a full list of options run:

python lora.py --help

Note, in the following the --model argument can be any compatible Hugging Face repo or a local path to a converted mdoel.

Fine-tune

To fine-tune a model use:

python lora.py --model <path_to_model> \
               --train \
               --iters 600

If --model points to a quantized model, then the training will use QLoRA, otherwise it will use regular LoRA.

By default, the adapter weights are saved in adapters.npz. You can specify the output location with --adapter-file.

You can resume fine-tuning with an existing adapter with --resume-adapter-file <path_to_adapters.npz>.

Evaluate

To compute test set perplexity use:

python lora.py --model <path_to_model> \
               --adapter-file <path_to_adapters.npz> \
               --test

Generate

For generation use:

python lora.py --model <path_to_model> \
               --adapter-file <path_to_adapters.npz> \
               --max-tokens 50 \
               --prompt "table: 1-10015132-16
columns: Player, No., Nationality, Position, Years in Toronto, School/Club Team
Q: What is terrence ross' nationality
A: "

Results

The initial validation loss for Llama 7B on the WikiSQL is 2.66 and the final validation loss after 1000 iterations is 1.23. The table below shows the training and validation loss at a few points over the course of training.

Iteration	Train Loss	Validation Loss
1	N/A	2.659
200	1.264	1.405
400	1.201	1.303
600	1.123	1.274
800	1.017	1.255
1000	1.070	1.230

The model trains at around 475 tokens per second on an M2 Ultra.

Fuse and Upload

You can generate a fused model with the low-rank adapters included using the fuse.py script. This script also optionally allows you to upload the fused model to the Hugging Face MLX Community.

To generate the fused model run:

python fuse.py

This will by default load the base model from mlx_model/, the adapters from adapters.npz, and save the fused model in the path lora_fused_model/. All of these are configurable. You can see the list of options with:

python fuse.py --help

To upload a fused model, supply the --upload-name and --hf-path arguments to fuse.py. The latter is the repo name of the original model, which is useful for the sake of attribution and model versioning.

For example, to fuse and upload a model derived from Mistral-7B-v0.1, run:

python fuse.py --upload-name My-4-bit-model --hf-repo mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1

Custom Data

You can make your own dataset for fine-tuning with LoRA. You can specify the dataset with --data=<my_data_directory>. Check the subdirectory data/ to see the expected format.

For fine-tuning (--train), the data loader expects a train.jsonl and a valid.jsonl to be in the data directory. For evaluation (--test), the data loader expects a test.jsonl in the data directory. Each line in the *.jsonl file should look like:

{"text": "This is an example for the model."}

Note other keys will be ignored by the loader.

Memory Issues

Fine-tuning a large model with LoRA requires a machine with a decent amount of memory. Here are some tips to reduce memory use should you need to do so:

1. Try quantization (QLoRA). You can use QLoRA by generating a quantized model with convert.py and the -q flag. See the Setup section for more details.

2. Try using a smaller batch size with --batch-size. The default is 4 so setting this to 2 or 1 will reduce memory consumption. This may slow things down a little, but will also reduce the memory use.

3. Reduce the number of layers to fine-tune with --lora-layers. The default is 16, so you can try 8 or 4. This reduces the amount of memory needed for back propagation. It may also reduce the quality of the fine-tuned model if you are fine-tuning with a lot of data.

4. Longer examples require more memory. If it makes sense for your data, one thing you can do is break your examples into smaller sequences when making the {train, valid, test}.jsonl files.

For example, for a machine with 32 GB the following should run reasonably fast:

python lora.py \
   --model mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 \
   --train \
   --batch-size 1 \
   --lora-layers 4

The above command on an M1 Max with 32 GB runs at about 250 tokens-per-second.

Footnotes

1. Refer to the arXiv paper for more details on LoRA. ↩

2. Refer to the paper QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs ↩

3. Refer to the GitHub repo for more information about WikiSQL. ↩