Project tutorial
Part 1 — What Is Fine-Tuning? Teach an Existing Model a New Job
Understand weights, training, and useful applications with a one-weight numerical experiment.
CodeTips Academy6 min read
Read Part 1
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Guided reading · 10 parts
Fine-Tuning Methods: Build a Workshop Assistant
Start with what fine-tuning means, then learn full tuning, adapters, LoRA, QLoRA, supervised instruction tuning, and preference tuning through ten clear articles, numerical examples, diagrams, and Python notebooks.
Start with Part 1- Project tutorial
Part 2 — Prepare the Data and Build a Baseline Before Training
Create a labeled workshop dataset, keep paraphrases together, and learn what a baseline reveals.
CodeTips Academy6 min readRead Part 2 - Project tutorial
Part 3 — Full Fine-Tuning Versus a Frozen Encoder
Adapt a pretrained miniature router and inspect exactly which parameters changed.
CodeTips Academy5 min readRead Part 3 - Project tutorial
Part 4 — Adapters, Bias-Only Updates, and Soft Prompts
Learn the PEFT family by training a bottleneck adapter and inspecting bias-only updates.
CodeTips Academy5 min readRead Part 4 - Project tutorial
Part 5 — LoRA from Scratch: Two Small Matrices Instead of One Large Update
Calculate a LoRA update by hand, train it, and prove that merging preserves predictions.
CodeTips Academy5 min readRead Part 5 - Project tutorial
Part 6 — Quantization and QLoRA: Understand the Memory Trade-Off
Quantize a small matrix, measure reconstruction error, and train an update around a frozen quantized base.
CodeTips Academy5 min readRead Part 6 - Project tutorial
Part 7 — Supervised Fine-Tuning: Teach a Model the Desired Response
Pretrain a tiny language model, mask prompt tokens, and teach a simple instruction-to-label format.
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Part 8 — Preference Tuning and DPO: Learn Which Answer Is Better
Calculate the DPO objective and train a tiny response-choice policy against a frozen reference.
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Part 9 — Evaluate, Compare, and Save Your Fine-Tuned Model
Compare five adaptation methods, inspect a confusion matrix, and verify a saved model reloads correctly.
CodeTips Academy6 min readRead Part 9 - Project tutorial
Part 10 — Use a Pretrained Model and Publish Your Notebooks on GitHub
Move from teaching models to an optional LoRA training script, then connect each notebook to its website article.
CodeTips Academy7 min readRead Part 10
