axolotl

Axolotl Skill

What's inside

Expert guidance for fine-tuning LLMs with Axolotl — YAML configs, 100+ models, LoRA/QLoRA, DPO/KTO/ORPO/GRPO, multimodal support.

Assistance with axolotl development, generated from official documentation.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be triggered when:

• Working with axolotl
• Asking about axolotl features or APIs
• Implementing axolotl solutions
• Debugging axolotl code
• Learning axolotl best practices

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