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by faxmeyourcode 105 days ago
Especially for super constrained applications. I don't care if the language model that I use for my extremely specific business domain can solve PhD math or remember the works of Shakespeare. I'd trade all of that for pure task specific accuracy.
1 comments
arkmm 104 days ago
Can you share more details about your use case? The good applications of fine tuning are usually pretty niche, which tends to make people feel like others might not be interested in hearing the details.

As a result it's really hard to read about real-world use cases online. I think a lot of people would love to hear more details - at least I know I would!

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faxmeyourcode 99 days ago
If you treat LLMs as generic transformers, you can fine tune with a ton of examples of input output pairs. For messy input data with lots of examples already built, this is ideal.

At my day job we have experimented with fine tuned transformers for our receipt processing workflow. We take images of receipts, run them through OCR (this step might not even be necessary, but we do it at scale already anyways), and then take the OCR output text blobs and "transform" them into structured receipts with retailer, details like zip code, transaction timestamps, line items, sales taxes, sales, etc.

I trained a small LLM (mistral-7b) via SFT with 1000 (maybe 10,000? I don't remember) examples from receipts in our database from 2019. When I tested the model on receipts from 2020 it hit something like 98% accuracy.

The key that made this work so well is that we had a ton of data (potentially billions of example input/output pairs) and we could easily evaluate the correctness by unpacking the json output and comparing with our source tables.

Note that this isn't running in production, it was an experiment. There are edge cases I didn't consider, and there's a lot more to it in terms of accurately evaling, when to re-train, dealing with net new receipt types, retailers, new languages (we're doing global expansion RN so it's top of mind), general diversity of edge cases in your training data, etc.

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