axolotl/examples/LiquidAI

Finetune Liquid Foundation Models 2 (LFM2) with Axolotl

Liquid Foundation Models 2 (LFM2) are a family of small, open-weight models from Liquid AI focused on quality, speed, and memory efficiency. Liquid AI released text-only LFM2 and text+vision LFM2-VL models.

LFM2 features a new hybrid Liquid architecture with multiplicative gates, short-range convolutions, and grouped query attention, enabling fast training and inference.

This guide shows how to fine-tune both the LFM2 and LFM2-VL models with Axolotl.

Thanks to the team at LiquidAI for giving us early access to prepare for these releases.

Getting Started

1. Install Axolotl following the installation guide.

   Here is an example of how to install from pip:

   # Ensure you have a compatible version of Pytorch installed
   uv pip install --no-build-isolation 'axolotl[flash-attn]>=0.12.0'
   

2. Run one of the finetuning examples below.

   LFM2

   # FFT SFT (1x48GB @ 25GiB)
   axolotl train examples/LiquidAI/lfm2-350m-fft.yaml
   

   LFM2-VL

   # LoRA SFT (1x48GB @ 2.7GiB)
   axolotl train examples/LiquidAI/lfm2-vl-lora.yaml
   

   LFM2-MoE

   uv pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.git@0c9a72e4576fe4c84077f066e585129c97bfd4e6
   
   # LoRA SFT (1x48GB @ 16.2GiB)
   axolotl train examples/LiquidAI/lfm2-8b-a1b-lora.yaml
   

TIPS

• Installation Error: If you encounter ImportError: ... undefined symbol ... or ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'causal_conv1d_cuda', the causal-conv1d package may have been installed incorrectly. Try uninstalling it:

  uv pip uninstall causal-conv1d
  

• Dataset Loading: Read more on how to load your own dataset in our documentation.

• Dataset Formats:

  • For LFM2 models, the dataset format follows the OpenAI Messages format as seen here.
  • For LFM2-VL models, Axolotl follows the multi-content Messages format. See our Multimodal docs for details.

Optimization Guides

• Optimizations Guide

Related Resources

• LFM2 Blog
• LFM2-VL Blog
• LFM2-MoE Blog
• Axolotl Docs
• Axolotl GitHub
• Axolotl Discord