How-to guides

Validation

As the saying goes, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it., In this section, we are going to cover different ways to measure and ultimately validate Llama so it's possible to determine the improvements provided by different fine tuning techniques.

Quantitative techniques

The focus of these techniques is to gather objective metrics that can be compared easily during and after each fine tuning run and to provide quick feedback on whether the model is performing. The main metrics collected are loss and perplexity.

This method consists in dividing the dataset into k subsets or folds, and then fine tuning the model k times. On each run, a different fold is used as a validation dataset, using the rest for training. The performance results of each run are averaged out for the final report. This provides a more accurate metric of the performance of the model across the complete dataset, as all entries serve both for validation and training. While it produces the most accurate prediction on how a model is going to generalize after fine tuning on a given dataset, it is computationally expensive and better suited for small datasets.

Holdout

When using a holdout, the dataset is split into two or three subsets, training and validation with test as optional. The test and validation sets can represent 10% - 30% of the dataset each. As the name implies, the first two subsets are used for training and validating the model during fine tuning, while the third is used only after fine tuning is complete to evaluate how well the model generalizes on data it has not seen in either phase. The advantage of having three partitions is that it provides a way to evaluate the model after fine-tuning for an unbiased view into the model performance, but it requires a slightly bigger dataset to allow for a proper split. This is currently implemented in the llama-cookbook fine tuning script with two subsets of the dataset: train and validation. The data is collected in a JSON file that can be plotted to easily interpret the results and evaluate how the model is performing.

Standard Evaluation tools

There are multiple projects that provide standard evaluation. They provide predefined tasks with commonly used metrics to evaluate the performance of LLMs, like HellaSwag and ThrouthfulQA. These tools can be used to test if the model has degraded after fine tuning. Additionally, a custom task can be created using the dataset intended to fine-tune the model, effectively automating the manual verification of the model performance before and after fine tuning. These types of projects provide a quantitative way of looking at the models performance in simulated real world examples. Some of these projects include the LM Evaluation Harness (used to create the HF leaderboard), HELM, BIG-bench and OpenCompass. As mentioned before, the torchtune library provides integration with the LM Evaluation Harness to test fine tuned models as well.

Interpreting Loss and Perplexity

The loss value used comes from the transformer's LlamaForCausalLM, which initializes a different loss function depending on the objective required from the model. The objective of this section is to give a brief overview on how to understand the results from loss and perplexity as an initial evaluation of the model performance during fine tuning. We also calculate the perplexity as an exponentiation of the loss value. Additional information on loss functions can be found in these resources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

In our recipes, we use a simple holdout during fine tuning. Using the logged loss values, both for train and validation dataset, the curves for both are plotted to analyze the results of the process. Given the setup in the recipe, the expected behavior is a log graph that shows a diminishing train and validation loss value as it progresses.

If the validation curve starts going up while the train curve continues decreasing, the model is overfitting and it's not generalizing well. Some alternatives to test when this happens are early stopping, verifying the validation dataset is a statistically significant equivalent of the train dataset, data augmentation, using parameter efficient fine tuning or using k-fold cross-validation to better tune the hyperparameters.

Qualitative techniques

Manual testing

Manually evaluating a fine tuned model will vary according to the FT objective and available resources. Here we provide general guidelines on how to accomplish it.

With a dataset prepared for fine tuning, a part of it can be separated into a manual test subset, which can be further increased with general knowledge questions that might be relevant to the specific use case. In addition to these general questions, we recommend executing standard evaluations as well, and compare the results with the baseline for the fine tuned model.

To rate the results, a clear evaluation criteria should be defined that is relevant to the dataset being used. Example criteria can be accuracy, coherence and safety. Create a rubric for each criteria and define what would be required for an output to receive a specific score.

With these guidelines in place, distribute the test questions with a diverse set of reviewers to have multiple data points for each question. With multiple data points for each question and different criteria, a final score can be calculated for each query, allowing for weighting the scores based on the preferred focus for the final model.