# Quickstart – Axolotl

# Quickstart

This guide will walk you through your first model fine-tuning project with Axolotl.

## 1 Quick Example

Let’s start by fine-tuning a small language model using LoRA. This example uses a 1B parameter model to ensure it runs on most GPUs. Assuming `axolotl` is installed (if not, see our Installation Guide)

1. Download example configs:

    axolotl fetch examples

2. Run the training:

    axolotl train examples/llama-3/lora-1b.yml

That’s it! Let’s understand what just happened.

## 2 Understanding the Process

### 2.1 The Configuration File

The YAML configuration file controls everything about your training. Here’s what (part of) our example config looks like:

    base_model: NousResearch/Llama-3.2-1B

    load_in_8bit: true
    adapter: lora

    datasets:
      - path: teknium/GPT4-LLM-Cleaned
        type: alpaca
    dataset_prepared_path: last_run_prepared
    val_set_size: 0.1
    output_dir: ./outputs/lora-out

Tip

`load_in_8bit: true` and `adapter: lora` enables LoRA adapter finetuning.

- To perform Full finetuning, remove these two lines.
- To perform QLoRA finetuning, replace with `load_in_4bit: true` and `adapter: qlora`.

See our config options for more details.

### 2.2 Training

When you run `axolotl train`, Axolotl:

1. Downloads the base model
2. (If specified) applies QLoRA/LoRA adapter layers
3. Loads and processes the dataset
4. Runs the training loop
5. Saves the trained model and / or LoRA weights

## 3 Your First Custom Training

Let’s modify the example for your own data:

1. Create a new config file `my_training.yml`:

    base_model: NousResearch/Nous-Hermes-llama-1b-v1

    load_in_8bit: true
    adapter: lora

    # Training settings
    micro_batch_size: 2
    num_epochs: 3
    learning_rate: 0.0003

    # Your dataset
    datasets:
      - path: my_data.jsonl        # Your local data file
        type: alpaca               # Or other format

This specific config is for LoRA fine-tuning a model with instruction tuning data using the `alpaca` dataset format, which has the following format:

    {
        "instruction": "Write a description of alpacas.",
        "input": "",
        "output": "Alpacas are domesticated South American camelids..."
    }

Please see our Dataset Formats for more dataset formats and how to format them.

2. Prepare your JSONL data in the specified format (in this case, the expected `alpaca` format):

    {"instruction": "Classify this text", "input": "I love this!", "output": "positive"}
    {"instruction": "Classify this text", "input": "Not good at all", "output": "negative"}

3. Run the training:

    axolotl train my_training.yml

## 4 Common Tasks

Tip

The same yaml file is used for training, inference, and merging.

### 4.1 Testing Your Model

After training, test your model:

    axolotl inference my_training.yml --lora-model-dir="./outputs/lora-out"

More details can be found in Inference.

### 4.2 Using a UI

Launch a Gradio interface:

    axolotl inference my_training.yml --lora-model-dir="./outputs/lora-out" --gradio

### 4.3 Preprocessing Data

For large datasets, preprocess first:

    axolotl preprocess my_training.yml

Please make sure to set `dataset_prepared_path:` in your config to set the path to save the prepared dataset.

More details can be found in Dataset Preprocessing.

### 4.4 Merging LoRA weights

To merge the LoRA weights back into the base model, run:

    axolotl merge-lora my_training.yml --lora-model-dir="./outputs/lora-out"

The merged model will be saved in the `{output_dir}/merged` directory.

More details can be found in Merging LoRA weights.

## 5 Next Steps

Now that you have the basics, you might want to:

- Try different model architectures
- Experiment with hyperparameters
- Use more advanced training methods
- Scale up to larger models

Check our other guides for details on these topics:

- Configuration Guide - Full configuration options
- Dataset Loading - Loading datasets from various sources
- Dataset Formats - Working with different data formats
- Multi-GPU Training
- Multi-Node Training