Comparing QLora, Lora, and Full Fine-tuning

Comprehensive analysis of difference in performance of QLora, Lora, and Full Fine-tuning.

Installation

1. Install python 3.9.x or 3.10.x

2. Install pytorch stable:

https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/

If this step fails, either at install or gives an error when training, do pip uninstall torch and try simply pip install torch

3. Install axolotl and dependencies

git clone https://github.com/AblateIt/axolotl.git
pip install -e axolotl/.
pip install -U git+https://github.com/huggingface/peft.git

There is a requirements.txt file in this repo, you might need to install some packages from this depending on what you are missing.

For contributors running sweeps and training

1. Request access to the AblateIt WandB and HuggingFace teams

2. Log into wandb and HuggingFace through the CLI

wandb login (login with the account added to the wandb org)
huggingface-cli login (login with the account added to the HF org)

How to start a sweep (you most likely will never do it)

1. Activate the correct environment
2. Set the default location to create new projects to ablateit. This is required to create the sweep but not to run finetuning.
3. python sweep.py --sweep_config <path_to_sweep_config> --project <wandb_project_name> --default_training_args <default_config_file_for_experiment>

For example to run QLora sweep, this command can be run python sweep.py --sweep_config configs/sweep_configs/qlora_sweep.yaml --project test-qlora_sweep --default_training_args configs/default_training_configs/default_qlora.yaml

How to Finetune configurations from a sweep.

1. Check if you have a default acclerate config and if you have it then delete it. You can check your huggingface cache folder, by default it points to this ~/.cache/huggingface/accelerate/default_config.yaml, if the default_config.yaml file exists then delete it.

2. Test your code by running the command CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 accelerate launch axolotl/scripts/finetune.py configs/test/qlora_experiment.yaml --main_process_port 0, this should run a qlora run on your GPU0. If not then please fix the error before running a sweep or else you will pull configurations from the sweep which will crash and no one else will be able to run them as well.

3. You would need a sweep_id and a project_id from one of the contributor who has started a sweep in order to run finetune experiments.

python sweep.py --sweep_id <sweep_id> --project <project_id> --gpu <gpu_id>

For example, this sample command will run finetuning on GPU 0. python sweep.py --sweep_id usevjjyj --CUDA_device_ids 0

FAQs

1. Accelerate running experiments on multiple GPUs or other accelerate issues.

Go to your huggingface cache folder and delete the default_config.yaml file. For examples the default location of this file would be would be at ~/.cache/huggingface/accelerate/default_config.yaml.

When running finetuning, if you are NOT seeing a messge like this, then you have a default accelerate config that is saved in your cache that needs to be DELETED.

The following values were not passed to `accelerate launch` and had defaults used instead:
        `--num_processes` was set to a value of `1`
        `--num_machines` was set to a value of `1`
        `--mixed_precision` was set to a value of `'no'`
        `--dynamo_backend` was set to a value of `'no'`
To avoid this warning pass in values for each of the problematic parameters or run `accelerate config`.

Links

• Discord
• HuggingFace
• WandB