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mymusise/chatglm-tuning

3,752PythonAudience · researcherComplexity · 4/5Setup · hard

TLDR

ChatGLM-Tuning lets you fine-tune the open-source ChatGLM-6B bilingual AI model using LoRA, a technique that customizes a large language model cheaply by training only a small set of extra parameters rather than the whole model.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((ChatGLM-Tuning))
    What It Does
      Fine-tunes ChatGLM-6B
      Uses LoRA technique
      Cheaper than full training
    Tech Stack
      Python
      PyTorch
      CUDA
      Hugging Face
    Requirements
      GPU 16GB+ VRAM
      Python 3.8+
      CUDA environment
    Datasets
      Alpaca English
      Alpaca Chinese-English
    How to Use
      Convert data format
      Tokenize dataset
      Run training script
      Load pretrained weights
    Audience
      AI researchers
      ML practitioners
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Fine-tune ChatGLM-6B on a custom instruction-following dataset using LoRA to create a domain-specific AI assistant without training from scratch.

USE CASE 2

Run the included Jupyter notebook on Google Colab to try ChatGLM fine-tuning without setting up a local GPU environment.

USE CASE 3

Load the author's pre-trained LoRA weights from Hugging Face to run inference on a customized ChatGLM-6B model immediately.

USE CASE 4

Adapt the data conversion scripts to convert your own Q&A or instruction dataset into the line-by-line JSON format needed for training.

Tech stack

PythonPyTorchCUDAHugging FaceJupyter

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1day+

Requires a CUDA-capable GPU with at least 16 GB VRAM (24 GB recommended), CPU-only training is not practical.

License terms are not stated in the explanation, check the repository directly.

In plain English

ChatGLM-Tuning is a Python project for fine-tuning ChatGLM-6B, an open-source bilingual Chinese and English language model developed by Tsinghua University, using a technique called LoRA. LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) lets you customize a large AI language model at a fraction of the usual cost by training only a small set of extra parameters rather than updating the entire model. The goal is to produce a more affordable alternative to building a ChatGPT-style assistant from scratch. The README is written primarily in Chinese. The training data used comes from the Alpaca dataset, a collection of instruction-following examples created by Stanford researchers. The project provides a Jupyter notebook so people with access to Google Colab can try it without setting up a local environment. Running the fine-tuning locally requires a GPU with at least 16 GB of video memory (24 GB or more is recommended), Python 3.8 or above, and a CUDA environment for deep learning. The process has two steps before training begins: first converting the Alpaca data into a line-by-line JSON format, then tokenizing it using ChatGLM's own tokenizer. The main training script accepts options for batch size, learning rate, number of steps, and where to save checkpoints. For those who do not want to train from scratch, the author has published two pre-trained LoRA weight sets on Hugging Face: one trained on the English Alpaca dataset and one trained on a combined Chinese and English version. A second notebook demonstrates how to load these weights for inference. The project also includes placeholder sections for a reward model and a reinforcement learning step (RLHF), which are part of the pipeline used to align language model outputs with human preferences, but those stages were not yet implemented at the time of writing.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Walk me through the full chatglm-tuning pipeline: converting the Alpaca dataset, tokenizing it, and launching the LoRA fine-tuning script with a batch size of 4 on a single A100 GPU.
Prompt 2
I want to fine-tune ChatGLM-6B on my own Chinese instruction dataset using chatglm-tuning. What JSON format does the training data need to be in and how do I run the conversion script?
Prompt 3
How do I load the pre-trained English LoRA weights from Hugging Face into ChatGLM-6B for inference using chatglm-tuning?
Prompt 4
What GPU memory is needed to run chatglm-tuning fine-tuning, and can I use gradient checkpointing or 8-bit quantization to fit it in less VRAM?
Prompt 5
What is LoRA and why does chatglm-tuning use it instead of full fine-tuning, how much cheaper is it in terms of GPU time and memory?
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