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Fine-Tuning ChatGPT for Text Generation With W&B

An in-depth guide on fine-tuning ChatGPT for text generation using Weights & Biases, highlighting the importance of data quality and model adaptation for specific tasks.
Created on September 17|Last edited on November 22
Few companies have the financial or compute resources to train LLMs on their own, so it follows that we're seeing far more fine-tuning than training from scratch. What's more, fine-tuning allows us to adapt the general LLM to our specific task, potentially increasing its performance. But how does one navigate the complex terrain of a behemoth like ChatGPT?
Dive deep with us as we explore the intricacies of adapting one of the most powerful language models to specific tasks, all the while employing the sophisticated tools provided by Weights & Biases (W&B). This article serves as a roadmap, guiding readers through the conceptual essence of fine-tuning, the need to refine ChatGPT for domain-specific tasks, and the invaluable features of W&B in monitoring and evaluating model performance.
Additionally, if you want more information than what we've provided here, you can download our free guide to fine-tuning and prompt engineering LLMs click the button below:

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Whether you're curious about the theoretical underpinnings or itching for a hands-on approach complete with code snippets and practical steps, this comprehensive guide has got you covered.
Here's what we'll be covering:

Table of Contents



What Is Fine-Tuning in Machine Learning?

Fine-tuning in machine learning refers to the process of taking a pre-trained model (a model trained on a large dataset) and refining it to perform better on a specific task. This is particularly useful in scenarios where the dataset for the specific task is much smaller.
Source
There are several reasons for adopting fine-tuning:
  • Specialized Tasks: Sometimes, the task at hand may be a specialized version of a more general task. For instance, while there might be a model that identifies objects, one might need a model that specifically identifies damaged goods in a factory setting. Fine-tuning allows for refining the model for such specific tasks.
  • Save Training Time: Training deep neural networks from scratch requires a lot of data and computational resources. With fine-tuning, you can leverage a pre-trained model and train it on a smaller dataset, saving both time and resources.
  • Transfer Learning: Often, the knowledge gained while solving one problem can aid performance on a related problem. With fine-tuning, a model trained on one task can be adapted to a different yet related task using a smaller dataset.

Fine-Tuning for ChatGPT

The need to fine-tune a sophisticated model like ChatGPT closely aligns with the considerations mentioned above. However, the process of adapting such an advanced large language model for particular tasks or domains demands nuanced attention and expertise.
While ChatGPT is highly capable of executing both general and specialized tasks with remarkable accuracy and finesse, there remain instances where targeted fine-tuning can provide significant advantages:
  • Lack of Data: Even though models like GPT-3 or ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of general data, they might not always be proficient in the nuanced jargon, terminology, or particularities of every niche domain. Consider the field of astrophysics. While ChatGPT has a broad understanding of it, the model might not be up-to-date on the very latest findings or grasp highly specialized topics as a domain expert would.
  • Token savings due to shorter prompts: By default, ChatGPT is designed to handle a wide range of queries, but this generality sometimes requires users to provide lengthier or more specific prompts to get the desired output. Fine-tuning can make the model more attuned to specific questions, thereby reducing the need for long prompts and saving on token usage.
  • Higher quality results than prompting: While default ChatGPT provides good answers in many contexts, there can be domains where the default responses might not match the depth or specificity desired. By fine-tuning with domain-specific data, the quality of responses can surpass what is achievable through mere prompting, providing more accurate and detailed answers.
  • Customized Tones and User Experience: Companies might want a chatbot that aligns with their brand voice or caters to a specific audience. By fine-tuning ChatGPT on custom datasets, businesses can tailor the chatbot's responses to be more in line with their branding or the specific needs of their audience.
  • Continuous Learning: The static nature of models like ChatGPT means that post-training, they're not updated with new information unless retrained. As industries progress and change, so do the knowledge base and best practices. By periodically fine-tuning ChatGPT with new data, companies can ensure that the model is always abreast of the latest standards, research findings, or industry shifts.

Introduction to Weights & Biases (W&B)

Weights & Biases (W&B) serves as a powerhouse for machine learning practitioners, enabling them to meticulously track, analyze, and visualize their experiments.
Imagine having a sophisticated dashboard that not only captures the intricacies of your model's evolution but also provides insights for comparison across multiple iterations. This is especially useful in machine learning, where different model architectures, hyperparameters, or data augmentation techniques are frequently tested.
Delving further into its capabilities, W&B allows for real-time logging of metrics, such as loss and accuracy, as well as capturing outputs like images and graphs. Additionally, it provides an overview of hyperparameters, ensuring a comprehensive snapshot of the experiment's state at any given moment.
Furthermore, for tasks like text generation, where gauging actual performance can be challenging without concrete metrics, W&B allows us to save both the original and updated responses for future comparison. This will be incredibly helpful later on in the fine-tuning process.
W&B also provides powerful visualization tools to understand experiment results. These include precision-recall curves, histograms of weights, and even custom visualizations. It helps in diagnosing issues like overfitting through these visualizations.


Preparing for Fine-Tuning

The quality of a dataset, particularly when task-specific, plays a pivotal role in the fine-tuning process, especially for models like ChatGPT. Such models, which are pre-trained on vast general datasets, possess broad knowledge but may lack the refined nuance required for specialized tasks.
Introducing high-quality, task-specific data for fine-tuning essentially steers the model towards domain-specific knowledge and expertise. This ensures that while ChatGPT retains its generalized knowledge, it also develops a more acute understanding of the unique patterns, terminology, and contexts associated with the particular task.
A subpar or noisy dataset, on the other hand, can lead to the model inheriting biases or inaccuracies, thereby compromising its efficacy. In essence, while ChatGPT's expansive pre-training provides it with a wide range of knowledge, it is the quality of the fine-tuning data that hones this knowledge, ensuring that the model's responses are not only accurate but also contextually relevant to the specific domain in question.
For the fine-tuning of ChatGPT, a minimum of 10 dataset examples is mandated. Given the importance of dataset quality, our approach was to craft our dataset by ourselves, ensuring precision and relevance. Our objective is to calibrate ChatGPT to the topic of LLMOp or large language model operations, as the model does provide various insights into what LLMOps actually stands for.
To actualize this, we collated ten meticulously curated samples. To ensure seamless integration and fine-tuning, it's imperative that the dataset adheres to a specific structure, as exemplified below.
Note: We're including line-breaks in this first block for readability. In the block below, you can scroll right.
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{"messages":
[{"role": "system", "content":
"ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."},
{"role": "user", "content": "What is LLMOps?"},
{"role": "assistant", "content": "LLMOps refers to the methodologies, practices, and tools that are designed to deploy, manage, and monitor large language models in real-world applications and production environments."}]}
And now, our full ten:
{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What is LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "LLMOps refers to the methodologies, practices, and tools that are designed to deploy, manage, and monitor large language models in real-world applications and production environments."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What are the challenges of LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Some challenges include: intensive computational resource requirements, effective handling and versioning of vast model weights, real-time response expectations despite the model's size, ensuring secure deployments given potential data recall issues, managing model biases and potential ethical concerns, cost implications of continuously running large models, keeping up with rapid advancements in the field, establishing reliable feedback mechanisms, and compliance with data privacy and regulatory standards."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What are the benefits of LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Benefits include advanced natural language understanding and generation capabilities, addressing a wide array of NLP tasks without task-specific training, improved user interactions due to human-like text processing, scalability, opportunities for domain-specific customization through fine-tuning, and reduction of manual oversight in many language tasks."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What are the use cases for LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Use cases encompass highly advanced chatbots, automated content creation, assisting developers with code suggestions, augmented data analysis, personalized learning assistants, enhanced search functionality with natural language understanding, business intelligence through sentiment analysis or trend spotting, and real-time translation or transcription services with nuanced understanding."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "How are large language models fine-tuned?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Large language models are fine-tuned using smaller, domain-specific datasets to adapt them for specific tasks or industries, ensuring more accurate and relevant responses."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "Why is model versioning important in LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Model versioning allows for tracking and managing different iterations of a model, ensuring reproducibility, and facilitating easy rollbacks to previous versions if issues arise."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "How do you handle data recall issues in large language models?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Data recall issues are addressed by carefully curating and anonymizing training data, implementing strict access controls, and occasionally using techniques like differential privacy."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "How do large language models impact cloud costs?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Due to their size and computational needs, large language models can significantly increase cloud infrastructure costs, especially when frequently accessed or when deployed across multiple instances."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "Are there environmental concerns with large language models?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Yes, training and deploying large language models require significant computational resources, leading to increased energy consumption and carbon footprints. There are ongoing efforts to make them more efficient and eco-friendly."}]}

{"messages": [{"role": "system", "content": "ChatGPT is an expert chatbot on machine learning and related topics."}, {"role": "user", "content": "What's the significance of feedback loops in LLMOps?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Feedback loops allow developers and users to report model behaviors, ensuring continuous improvement, addressing biases, and refining the model's accuracy over time."}]}
The dataset above initiates with the System role, outlining the context or prompt for the ChatGPT model. Following this is the User's role, presenting a specific query/prompt to the model. Finally, it culminates with the Assistant's role, which furnishes the response/answer to the posed question.

Fine-Tuning ChatGPT

Step 1: Installing and Importing Necessary Libraries

!pip install openai
!pip install wandb
!pip install git+https://github.com/wandb/wandb.git@openai-finetuning

import os
import openai
import wandb
from openai import OpenAI
from wandb.integration.openai import WandbLogger

Step 2: Initializing Weights & Biases

To simplify our workflow, we'll be leveraging the WandbLogger() function, a specialized tool developed to seamlessly integrate Weights & Biases (W&B) with OpenAI models, including GPT-3. This function is engineered to optimize the fine-tuning and monitoring of these advanced models, providing a more streamlined and efficient experience in managing and evaluating their performance.
To know more about the function and to check the multitude of additional parameters that can be passed to this function click here.
WandbLogger.sync(project="chatgpt3.5-fine-tuning-for-Sentiment-Analysis")

Step 3: Inserting OpenAI Key

openai.api_key = "Insert Your Key Here"

Step 4: Creating Dataset File

client = openai.Client()

training_file = client.files.create(
file=open("/kaggle/input/largelanguagemodeltraining/LLMOpsTraining.jsonl", "rb"),
purpose='fine-tune'
)

training_file_id = training_file.id

Step 5: Fine-Tuning the ChatGPT Model

Next, we'll initiate the fine-tuning process using the FineTuningJob.Create() method. Once you've prepared the training file (as described in step 4), this file can be supplied to the FineTuningJob.Create() method. Additionally, we should specify the model that we are aiming to fine-tune, which is gpt-3.5-turbo in this case.
fine_tuning_job = client.fine_tuning.jobs.create(
training_file=training_file_id,
model="gpt-3.5-turbo"
)

job_id = fine_tuning_job.id

Step 6: Testing Our Fine-tuned Vs. Non-Fine-Tuned Model Responses

In the following code, we will be creating a comparison table which includes the given prompt, the question, the old model's response, and the new model's response.
First, we will data engineer our validation dataset which we will test our models on
file_path = '/kaggle/input/largelanguagemodeltraining/LLMOpsTraining.jsonl'

# Process the dataset
dataset = []
with open(file_path, 'r') as file:
for line in file:
try:
data_point = json.loads(line)
dataset.append(data_point["messages"])
except json.JSONDecodeError as e:
print(f"Error decoding JSON: {e}")

# List to store results
results = []
The following is a loop that iterates through our data points, comparing the responses from both models. Finally, we log our table into W&B for good keeping.

# Generate responses and process them
for messages in dataset:
system_message = next((m['content'] for m in messages if m['role'] == 'system'), None)
user_query = next((m['content'] for m in messages if m['role'] == 'user'), None)

# Generate completion with the fine-tuned model
completion_ft = client.chat.completions.create(
model="ft:gpt-3.5-turbo-0613:personal::8Lw0APbe",
messages=messages
)
response_ft = completion_ft.choices[0].message.content

# Generate completion with the standard model
completion_std = client.chat.completions.create(
model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
messages=messages
)
response_std = completion_std.choices[0].message.content

# Append results to the list
results.append({
"system": system_message,
"user": user_query,
"fine_tuned_response": response_ft,
"standard_model_response": response_std
})

# Convert results to a DataFrame
df_results = pd.DataFrame(results)

# Log the DataFrame as a table to W&B
wandb.log({"results_table": wandb.Table(dataframe=df_results)})

Step 10: Finishing the Weights & Biases Run

wandb.finish()

Tracking and Evaluating Model Performance

To view all the data you've logged to Weights & Biases, simply click on the link given at the conclusion of your code execution. The link will resemble the example provided below.

Next, a new Weights & Biases page will appear. Select the "Overview" button on the left-hand side. This action will display a page akin to the example below. On the right, you'll find a summary of the data logged to W&B via the wandb.log() function.
For our text generation task, the most straightforward method to monitor our model's performance is by comparing its responses before and after the fine-tuning process.

This set of panels contains runs from a private project, which cannot be shown in this report

In its non-fine-tuned version, when one poses a query about "LLMOps" to ChatGPT, the responses can be unexpected. Sometimes, it interprets "LLMOps" as "Low Latency Operation," while on other occasions, it might suggest "Low-Level Machine Learning Operations." Such discrepancies can be attributed to the nascent nature of large language models, which may not be thoroughly represented in the training data. Consequently, the model strives to discern the most likely meaning of the term, resulting in a spectrum of interpretations that can sometimes be perplexing.
In the response from the fine-tuned version of ChatGPT, the model provides the definition of LLMOps that we trained it on, namely "Large Language Models Operations." That's the improvement we want to see.

Tips for Successful Fine-Tuning

If you'd like to dig in deeper, we highly recommend the article from Boris Dayma entitled Fine-Tuning Tips and Exploration on OpenAI's GPT-3
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Not Training the Model on Enough Data

In most cases, it is highly possible that there might be certain questions or data related to LLMOps that are absent from the training. This could lead to gaps in the model's understanding or responses. For instance, if the model has been trained on the foundational definition of LLMOps but isn't familiar with its specific challenges, it might struggle to accurately answer the query, "What are the challenges of LLMOps?"

Training to Quality Ratio

Ensure a balance between the quantity of training data and its quality. According to OpenAI's documentation, a minimum of 10 examples is recommended for the training process. However, in some instances, just 10 examples can yield satisfactory results for the model. It is worth noting that the more data you train your model on the more cost the training process will require.

Checking for Data Diversity

In simpler terms, if you over-train the model with a specific type of response, it will be biased towards giving that response, even when it's not the most appropriate answer. For instance, if half of the model's fine-tuning examples contain a similar response, the model will likely produce that response, even if it's not appropriate. It underscores the importance of ensuring your training data aligns with the expected behavior of the model in real-world scenarios.

Conclusion

This article illuminated the art of fine-tuning, a process that, when executed meticulously, empowers models like ChatGPT to transcend their vast general knowledge and tailor their capabilities for specific tasks.
By leveraging the robust tools provided by Weights & Biases, practitioners can navigate the intricate journey of model adaptation with precision, real-time monitoring, and effective evaluation. The intricate interplay between data quality, volume, and diversity stands out as a critical element, underscoring the importance of curating datasets with the utmost care and diligence. Furthermore, the side-by-side comparison of a model's performance pre and post-fine-tuning serves as a testament to the tangible benefits and enhanced consistency achieved through the process.
In an era where machine learning models are rapidly permeating diverse industries and applications, the ability to fine-tune them for domain-specific tasks is not just a luxury, but a necessity. As businesses and researchers continue to harness the power of large language models, the insights from this guide can serve as a beacon, ensuring that the promise of AI is realized in its fullest, most contextually relevant form.



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