Pretraining With Downstream Validation
Learn how to configure downstream validation as part of your pretraining workflow.
On this page, you’ll build on the Pretraining with Upstream Validation guide.
The example will be for pretraining Llama-3-8B model. For downstream validation, you’ll use the external frameworks Eleuther Eval Harness (EEH) and BigCode Eval Harness (BCEH).
By the end of this guide, you should be comfortable kicking off your own pretraining run for the model of your choice, combining both upstream and downstream validation.
Prerequisites
Before beginning this guide, make sure you’ve:
- Completed setup and installation.
- Read Trainer Essentials and Trainer Configuration which cover the basics of running models in Model Zoo.
- Read Pretraining with Upstream Validation as this guide directly builds on the walkthrough there.
- Read Downstream Validation Using Eleuther Eval Harness and Downstream Validation using BigCode Eval Harness).
Configure the Run
Similar to Pretraining with Upstream Validation, this page will present the YAML configuration file as well as the equivalent pure Python setup side-by-side for your ease of comparison.
You will add downstream validation to the pretraining configuration set up in Pretraining with Upstream Validation for Llama-3-8B. Recall the full configuration you put together from that tutorial:
Configure EEH
Let’s add downstream validation on a single EEH multiple-choice task winogrande
as part of the pretraining run. To do this, you will need to augment the configuration with the EleutherEvalHarness
callback as such:
As part of your pretraining run’s configuration, you have now set up downstream validation on EEH task winogrande
.
-
The
eval_frequency
specified as part of the trainer’s loop (YAML) or in theTrainingLoop
object (Python) also controls the frequency of downstream validation; i.e., for your example above, validation on EEH taskwinogrande
will be run every 1K steps. -
Update the
tasks
argument to configure downstream validation for more EEH tasks. Note that only a single generative EEH task may be specified per callback.
Configure BCEH
Configuring downstream validation using BCEH is no different than it is for EEH. For example, if you want to configure the pretraining run on the code generative task humaneval
, please augment the YAML configuration file with the the BigCodeEvalHarness
callback as such:
-
YAML: Simply add the callback to the list of callbacks in the YAML. Don’t forget to include the inference settings under model configuration!
-
Python: Construct a
BigCodeEvalHarness
callback object and pass it to the Trainer’s constructor as follows. Note that the BCEH arguments are passed to the callback via theBigCodeCLIArgs
object, comprising the list of supported BCEH command line arguments.
And that is all! As part of your pretraining run’s configuration, you have now set up downstream validation on BCEH task humaneval
.
-
Since only running one generative eval harness task is supported per callback, please create a separate
BigCodeEvalHarness
callback to run downstream validation for more BCEH tasks. -
To obtain the final eval metrics for BCEH, please run the code execution and evaluation flow separately using the Downstream Validation using BigCode Eval Harness guide.
Configure EEH and BCEH
Configuring downstream validation for both EEH and BCEH is also straightforward via the use of both the BigCodeEvalHarness
callbacks.
Let’s augment the full YAML configuration file to run downstream validation on EEH tasks hellaswag
, gsm8k
and winogrande
, and BCEH task mbpp
with the callbacks as follows:
-
YAML: Simply add both callbacks to the list of callbacks in the YAML. Since you are running generative eval harness tasks, don’t forget to include the inference settings under model configuration!
-
Python: Construct
BigCodeEvalHarness
objects, respectively.
And that is all! As part of your pretraining run’s configuration, you have now set up downstream validation on both BCEH and EEH tasks.
Start Pretraining
Once you have a fully configured Trainer, with your choice of downstream validation, all you need to do now is to kick off the run and start pretraining.
-
YAML: Let’s assume that the YAML configuration that you put together above is written to a file called
./pretrain_downstream_llama_8b.yaml
. To run pretraining use the CLI command. -
Python: Let’s assume that the python code that you put together above is written to a file called
./pretrain_downstream_llama_8b.py
. To run pretraining, execute that python script.