How to Fine-Tune Llama 3 on Your Own Data: A Practical Guide
In our Simple Guide to LoRA, we explored the theory behind Low-Rank Adaptation and how it slashes the GPU memory requirements for model training. Now, let’s put theory into practice. In this guide, we’ll walk through a step-by-step, hands-on tutorial to fine-tune Meta’s Llama 3 (8B) on a custom dataset using Hugging Face, PEFT, and QLoRA (Quantized LoRA) on a single GPU. Step 1: Format Your Dataset To train Llama 3, you need prompt-response pairs. Llama 3 uses a specific chat template format. For custom datasets, the easiest approach is to structure your data as a JSON file containing lists of messages: ...