Supervised fine-tuning (SFT)

The following sections outline the process of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), both full-rank SFT and parameter-efficient SFT.

Full-rank supervised fine-tuning (SFT)

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the process of providing a collection of prompt-response pairs to a foundation model to improve the performance of a pre-trained foundation model on a specific task. The labeled examples are formatted as prompt-response pairs and phrased as instructions. This fine-tuning process modifies the weights of the model.

You should use SFT when you have domain-specific data that requires providing specific prompt-response pairs for optimal results.

Note that your training and validation input datasets must reside in customer-owned buckets, not in escrow, or service-managed S3 buckets.

Data requirements

For full-rank SFT and low-rank adapter (LoRA) SFT, the data should follow the Amazon Bedrock Converse operation format. For examples and constraints of this format, see Preparing data for fine-tuning Understanding models.

To validate your dataset format before submission, we recommend using the validation script from the Amazon Bedrock samples repository. This validation tool helps ensure that your JSONL files adhere to the required format specifications and identify any potential issues before you submit your fine-tuning job.

The Amazon Nova parameters that are available for tuning with SFT are as follows:

Quick start with a full-rank SFT recipe

The following is a recipe for full-rank SFT that's intended for you to quickly start an SFT job on a HyperPod cluster. This recipe also assumes that you have connected to your HyperPod cluster using the correct AWS credentials.

run:
  name: "my-sft-micro-job" # gets appended with a unique ID for HP jobs
  model_type: "amazon.nova-micro-v1:0:128k"
  model_name_or_path: "nova-micro/prod"
  replicas: 2
  data_s3_path: s3:Replace with your S3 bucket name/input.jsonl
  validation_data_s3_path: [OPTIONAL] s3:your S3 bucket name/input.jsonl
  output_s3_path: [S3_PATH_TO_STORE_MANIFEST]

## training specific configs
training_config:
  max_length: 32768
  save_steps: 100000
  replicas: ${recipes.run.replicas}
  micro_batch_size: 1
  task_type: sft
  global_batch_size: 64
  weights_only: True
  allow_percentage_invalid_samples: 10 

  exp_manager:
    exp_dir: null
    create_wandb_logger: False
    create_tensorboard_logger: True
      project: null
      name: null
    checkpoint_callback_params:
      monitor: step
      save_top_k: 10
      mode: max
      every_n_train_steps: ${recipes.training_config.save_steps} 
      save_last: True
    create_early_stopping_callback: True
    early_stopping_callback_params:
      min_delta: 0.001
      mode: min
      monitor: "val_loss"
      patience: 2

  trainer:
    log_every_n_steps: 1
    max_epochs: -1 
    max_steps: 16 
    val_check_interval: 100
    limit_test_batches: 0
    gradient_clip_val: 1.0
    num_nodes: ${recipes.training_config.replicas}

  model: 
    hidden_dropout: 0.0 # Dropout probability for hidden state transformer.
    attention_dropout: 0.0 # Dropout probability in the attention layer.
    ffn_dropout: 0.0 # Dropout probability in the feed-forward layer.
    sequence_parallel: True
    optim:
      lr: 1e-5
      name: distributed_fused_adam 
      bucket_cap_mb: 10
      contiguous_grad_buffer: False
      overlap_param_sync: False
      contiguous_param_buffer: False
      overlap_grad_sync: False
      adam_w_mode: true
      eps: 1e-06
      weight_decay: 0.0
      betas:
        - 0.9
        - 0.999
      sched:
        name: CosineAnnealing 
        warmup_steps: 10
        constant_steps: 0
        min_lr: 1e-6

    mm_cfg:
      llm:
        freeze: false
      image_projector:
        freeze: true
        require_newline: true 
      video_projector:
        freeze: true
        require_newline: false

    peft:
      peft_scheme: null

    training_validation:
      loader:
        args:
          data_loader_workers: 1 
          prefetch_factor: 2
      collator:
        args:
          force_image_at_turn_beginning: false

Sample full-rank recipe

The following is a sample full-rank recipe for SFT with all components properly configured.

## Run config
run:
    name: "my-sft-run"              # A descriptive name for your training job
    model_type: "amazon.nova-lite-v1:0:300k"  # Model variant specification
    model_name_or_path: "nova-lite/prod"      # Base model path
    replicas: 4                     # Number of compute instances for training
    data_s3_path: s3:Replace with your S3 bucket name/input.jsonl
    validation_data_s3_path: [OPTIONAL] s3:your S3 bucket name/input.jsonl
    output_s3_path: [S3_PATH_TO_STORE_MANIFEST]

## Training specific configs    
training_config:
    max_length: 32768               # Maximum context window size (tokens)

    trainer:
        max_epochs: 2               # Number of training epochs
 
    model: 
        hidden_dropout: 0.0          # Dropout for hidden states
        attention_dropout: 0.0       # Dropout for attention weights
        ffn_dropout: 0.0             # Dropout for feed-forward networks
        
        optim:
            lr: 1e-5                 # Learning rate
            name: distributed_fused_adam  # Optimizer algorithm
            adam_w_mode: true        # Enable AdamW mode
            eps: 1e-06               # Epsilon for numerical stability
            weight_decay: 0.0        # L2 regularization strength
            betas:                   # Adam optimizer betas
                - 0.9
                - 0.999
            sched:
                warmup_steps: 10     # Learning rate warmup steps
                constant_steps: 0    # Steps at constant learning rate
                min_lr: 1e-6         # Minimum learning rate
        
        peft:
            peft_scheme: null        # Set to null for full-parameter fine-tuning

Limitations

Publishing metrics to Weights & Biases and MLFlow is not supported.

Intermediate checkpoints are not saved for evaluation and you can't resume from an intermediate checkpoint. Only the last checkpoint is saved.

To adjust the hyperparameters, follow the guidance in Selecting hyperparameters.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) involves retraining a small number of additional weights to adapt a foundation model to new tasks or domains. Specifically, low-rank adapter (LoRA) PEFT efficiently fine-tunes foundation models by introducing low-rank trainable weight matrices into specific model layers, reducing the number of trainable parameters while maintaining model quality.

A LoRA PEFT adapter augments the base foundation model by incorporating lightweight adapter layers that modify the model’s weights during inference while keeping the original model parameters intact. This approach is also considered one of the most cost-effective fine-tuning techniques. For more information, see Fine-tune models with adapter inference components.

You should use LoRA PEFT in the following scenarios:

The Amazon Nova parameters that are available for with LoRA PEFT include:

PEFT recipe

The following is a recipe for LoRA PEFT.

## Run config
run:
    name: "my-lora-run"             # A descriptive name for your training job
    model_type: "amazon.nova-lite-v1:0:300k"  # Model variant specification
    model_name_or_path: "nova-lite/prod"      # Base model path
    replicas: 4                     # Number of compute instances for training
    output_s3_path: [S3_PATH_TO_STORE_MANIFEST]

## Training specific configs    
training_config:
    max_length: 32768               # Maximum context window size (tokens)

    trainer:
        max_epochs: 2               # Number of training epochs
 
    model: 
        hidden_dropout: 0.0          # Dropout for hidden states
        attention_dropout: 0.0       # Dropout for attention weights
        ffn_dropout: 0.0             # Dropout for feed-forward networks
        
        optim:
            lr: 1e-5                 # Learning rate
            name: distributed_fused_adam  # Optimizer algorithm
            adam_w_mode: true        # Enable AdamW mode
            eps: 1e-06               # Epsilon for numerical stability
            weight_decay: 0.0        # L2 regularization strength
            betas:                   # Adam optimizer betas
                - 0.9
                - 0.999
            sched:
                warmup_steps: 10     # Learning rate warmup steps
                constant_steps: 0    # Steps at constant learning rate
                min_lr: 1e-6         # Minimum learning rate
        
        peft:
            peft_scheme: "lora"      # Enable LoRA for parameter-efficient fine-tuning
            lora_tuning:
                loraplus_lr_ratio: 8.0  # LoRA+ learning rate scaling factor
                alpha: 32            # Scaling factor for LoRA weights
                adapter_dropout: 0.01  # Regularization for LoRA parameters

Limitations

PEFT has the following limitations:

Troubleshooting

Use the following information to help resolve issues that you might encounter: