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Overview

This tutorial teaches you about Cerebras essentials like data preprocessing and training scripts, config files, and checkpoint conversion tools. To understand these concepts, you’ll fine-tune Meta’s Llama 3 8B on a small dataset consisting of documents and their summaries. In this quickstart guide, you will:
  • Setup your environment
  • Pre-process a small dataset
  • Port a trained model from Hugging Face
  • Fine-tune and evaluate a model
  • Test your model on downstream tasks
  • Port your model to Hugging Face
In this tutorial, you will train your model for a short while on a small dataset. A high quality model requires a longer training run, as well as a much larger dataset.

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Prerequisites

To begin this guide, you must have:
  • Cerebras system access. If you don’t have access, contact Cerebras Support.
  • Completed setup and installation.

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Workflow

1

Create Model Directory & Copy Configs

First, save the working directory to an environment variable:
export MODELZOO_PARENT=$(pwd)
Then, create a dedicated folder to store assets (like data and model configs) and generated files (such as processed datasets, checkpoints, and logs):
mkdir finetuning_tutorial
Next, copy the sample configs into your folder. These include model configs, evaluation configs, and data configs.
cp modelzoo/src/cerebras/modelzoo/tutorials/finetuning/* finetuning_tutorial
We use cp here to copy configs specifically designed for this tutorial. For general use with Model Zoo models, we recommend using cszoo config pull. See the CLI command reference for details.
2

Inspect Configs

Before moving on, inspect the configuration files you just copied to confirm that the parameters are set as expected.
3

Preprocess Data

Use your data configs to preprocess your “train” and “validation” datasets:
cszoo data_preprocess run --config finetuning_tutorial/train_data_config.yaml
cszoo data_preprocess run --config finetuning_tutorial/valid_data_config.yaml
You should then see your preprocessed data in finetuning_tutorial/train_data/ and finetuning_tutorial/valid_data/ (see the output_dir parameter in your data configs).
When using the Hugging Face CLI to download a dataset, you may encounter the following error: KeyError: 'tags'This issue occurs due to an outdated version of the huggingface_hub package. To resolve it, update the package to version 0.26.1 by running:pip install --upgrade huggingface_hub==0.26.1
An example of “train” looks as follows:
{
    "document": "In Wales, councils are responsible for funding..",
    "summary": "As Chancellor George Osborne announced...",
    "id": "35821725"
}
4

Download Checkpoint and Configs

Create a dedicated folder for the checkpoint and configuration files you’ll be downloading from Hugging Face.
mkdir finetuning_tutorial/from_hf
You can either fine-tune a model from a local pre-trained checkpoint or (as in this tutorial) from Hugging Face.First, download checkpoint and configuration files from Hugging Face using the commands below. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be using McGill’s Llama 3-8B-Web, a finetuned Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct model.
wget -P finetuning_tutorial/from_hf https://huggingface.co/McGill-NLP/Llama-3-8B-Web/resolve/main/pytorch_model.bin
wget -P finetuning_tutorial/from_hf https://huggingface.co/McGill-NLP/Llama-3-8B-Web/resolve/main/config.json
This will save two files in the finetuning_tutorial/from_hf directory:
  • config.json: The model’s configuration file.
  • pytorch_model.bin: The model’s weights.
5

Convert Checkpoint and Configs

You can now convert the files to a format compatible with Model Zoo:
cszoo checkpoint convert --model llama --src-fmt hf --tgt-fmt cs-current --config finetuning_tutorial/from_hf/config.json finetuning_tutorial/from_hf/pytorch_model.bin
Your finetuning_tutorial/from_hf folder should now contain:
  • pytorch_model_to_cs-2.3.mdl: The converted model checkpoint.
  • config_to_cs-2.3.yaml: The converted configuration file.
While you will not need to do this in this quickstart since it has already been done for you, as a final step, you will usually point ckpt_path in your finetuning_tutorial/model_config.yaml to the location of this converted checkpoint.
6

Train and Evaluate Model

Set train_dataloader.data_dir and val_dataloader.data_dir in your model config to the absolute paths of your preprocessed data:
sed -i "s|data_dir: train_data|data_dir: ${MODELZOO_PARENT}/finetuning_tutorial/train_data|" \
  finetuning_tutorial/model_config.yaml

sed -i "s|data_dir: valid_data|data_dir: ${MODELZOO_PARENT}/finetuning_tutorial/valid_data|" \
  finetuning_tutorial/model_config.yaml
Train your model by passing your updated model configs, the location of important directories, and python packages to a run script. Click here for more information.
cszoo fit finetuning_tutorial/model_config.yaml
You should then see something like this in your terminal:
Transferring weights to server: 100%|██| 1165/1165 [01:00<00:00, 19.33tensors/s]
INFO:   Finished sending initial weights
INFO:   | Train Device=CSX, Step=50, Loss=8.31250, Rate=69.37 samples/sec, GlobalRate=69.37 samples/sec
INFO:   | Train Device=CSX, Step=100, Loss=7.25000, Rate=68.41 samples/sec, GlobalRate=68.56 samples/sec
...
Once training is complete, you will find several artifacts in the finetuning_tutorial/model folder (see the model_dir parameter in your model config). These include:
  • Checkpoints
  • TensorBoard event files
  • Run logs
  • A copy of the model config

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Inspect Training Logs (optional)

Monitor your training during the run or visualize TensorBoard event files afterwards:
tensorboard --bind_all --logdir="finetuning_tutorial/model"
7

Run Evaluation Tasks

After training, you can test your model on downstream tasks:
cszoo lm_eval finetuning_tutorial/eeh_config.yaml --tasks=winogrande --checkpoint_path=finetuning_tutorial/model/checkpoint_18.mdl --mgmt_namespace <namespace>
Your output logs should look something like:
...
2024-06-24 11:06:49,596 INFO:   | EleutherAI Eval Device=CSX, GlobalStep=1, Batch=632, Rate=34.38 samples/sec, GlobalRate=34.34 samples/sec
2024-06-24 11:06:49,625 INFO:   | EleutherAI Eval Device=CSX, GlobalStep=1, Batch=633, Rate=34.39 samples/sec, GlobalRate=34.35 samples/sec
2024-06-24 11:07:04,333 INFO:   <cerebras.modelzoo.trainer.extensions.eleuther.lm_eval_harness.EleutherLM object at 0x7ff89ae3ceb0> (None), gen_kwargs: ({'temperature': None, 'top_k': None, 'top_p': None, 'max_tokens': None}), limit: None, num_fewshot: None, batch_size: None
2024-06-24 11:07:04,696 INFO:
|  Tasks   |Version|Filter|n-shot|Metric|Value |   |Stderr|
|----------|------:|------|-----:|------|-----:|---|-----:|
|winogrande|      1|none  |     0|acc   |0.7284|±  |0.0141|
8

Port Model to Hugging Face

Once you train (and evaluate) your model, you can port it to Hugging Face to generate outputs:
cszoo checkpoint convert --model llama --src-fmt cs-auto --tgt-fmt hf --config finetuning_tutorial/model_config.yaml --output-dir finetuning_tutorial/to_hf finetuning_tutorial/model/checkpoint_0.mdl
This will create both Hugging Face config files and a converted checkpoint under finetuning_tutorial/to_hf.
9

Validate checkpoint and configs (optional)

You can now generate outputs using Hugging Face:
pip install 'transformers[torch]'

python

Python 3.8.16 (default, Mar 18 2024, 18:27:40)
[GCC 8.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoConfig
>>> from transformers import pipeline
>>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("baseten/Meta-Llama-3-tokenizer")
>>> config = AutoConfig.from_pretrained("finetuning_tutorial/to_hf/model_config_to_hf.json")
>>> model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(pretrained_model_name_or_path="finetuning_tutorial/to_hf/checkpoint_0_to_hf.bin", config = config)
>>> text = "Generative AI is "
>>> pipe = pipeline("text-generation", model=model, tokenizer=tokenizer)
>>> generated_text = pipe(text, max_length=50, do_sample=False, no_repeat_ngram_size=2, eos_token_id=pipeline.tokenizer.eos_token_id, pad_token_id=pipeline.tokenizer.eos_token_id)[0]
>>> print(generated_text['generated_text'])
>>> exit()
As a reminder, in this quickstart, you did not train your model for very long. A high quality model requires a longer training run, as well as a much larger dataset.

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Conclusion

Congratulations! In this tutorial, you followed an end-to-end workflow to fine-tune a model on a Cerebras system and learn about essential tools and scripts. As part of this, your learned how to:
  • Setup your environment
  • Pre-process a small dataset
  • Port a trained model from Hugging Face
  • Fine-tune and evaluate a model
  • Test your model on downstream tasks
  • Port your model to Hugging Face

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What’s Next?