axolotl

name	axolotl
description	Expert guidance for fine-tuning LLMs with Axolotl - YAML configs, 100+ models, LoRA/QLoRA, DPO/KTO/ORPO/GRPO, multimodal support
version	1.0.0
author	Orchestra Research
license	MIT
tags	["Fine-Tuning","Axolotl","LLM","LoRA","QLoRA","DPO","KTO","ORPO","GRPO","YAML","HuggingFace","DeepSpeed","Multimodal"]
dependencies	["axolotl","torch","transformers","datasets","peft","accelerate","deepspeed"]

Axolotl Skill

Guidance for fine-tuning LLMs with Axolotl, covering YAML configuration patterns, FSDP/context-parallel setup, dataset handling, and the Python API.

Quick Reference

Common Patterns

Pattern 1: To validate that acceptable data transfer speeds exist for your training job, running NCCL Tests can help pinpoint bottlenecks, for example:

./build/all_reduce_perf -b 8 -e 128M -f 2 -g 3

Pattern 2: Configure your model to use FSDP in the Axolotl yaml. For example:

fsdp_version: 2
fsdp_config:
  offload_params: true
  state_dict_type: FULL_STATE_DICT
  auto_wrap_policy: TRANSFORMER_BASED_WRAP
  transformer_layer_cls_to_wrap: LlamaDecoderLayer
  reshard_after_forward: true

Pattern 3: The context_parallel_size should be a divisor of the total number of GPUs. For example:

context_parallel_size

Pattern 4: For example: - With 8 GPUs and no sequence parallelism: 8 different batches processed per step - With 8 GPUs and context_parallel_size=4: Only 2 different batches processed per step (each split across 4 GPUs) - If your per-GPU micro_batch_size is 2, the global batch size decreases from 16 to 4

context_parallel_size=4

Pattern 5: Setting save_compressed: true in your configuration enables saving models in a compressed format, which: - Reduces disk space usage by approximately 40% - Maintains compatibility with vLLM for accelerated inference - Maintains compatibility with llmcompressor for further optimization (example: quantization)

save_compressed: true

Pattern 6: Note It is not necessary to place your integration in the integrations folder. It can be in any location, so long as it’s installed in a package in your python env. See this repo for an example: https://github.com/axolotl-ai-cloud/diff-transformer

integrations

Pattern 7: Handle both single-example and batched data. - single example: sample[‘input_ids’] is a list[int] - batched data: sample[‘input_ids’] is a list[list[int]]

utils.trainer.drop_long_seq(sample, sequence_len=2048, min_sequence_len=2)

Example Code Patterns

Example 1 (python):

cli.cloud.modal_.ModalCloud(config, app=None)

Example 2 (python):

cli.cloud.modal_.run_cmd(cmd, run_folder, volumes=None)

Example 3 (python):

core.trainers.base.AxolotlTrainer(
    *_args,
    bench_data_collator=None,
    eval_data_collator=None,
    dataset_tags=None,
    **kwargs,
)

Example 4 (python):

core.trainers.base.AxolotlTrainer.log(logs, start_time=None)

Example 5 (python):

prompt_strategies.input_output.RawInputOutputPrompter()

Resources

• Official documentation: https://docs.axolotl.ai
• GitHub: https://github.com/axolotl-ai-cloud/axolotl