PARAMETER EFFICIENT FINE-TUNING AND OVERFITTING IN GPT LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS: A METRIC-BASED COMPARISON

• Published in: Електроніка та інформаційні технологіі Vol. 30; no. 30; pp. 33 - 42
• Main Authors: Pavlyshenko, Bohdan, Bulka, Ivan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ivan Franko National University of Lviv 01.06.2025
• Subjects: fine-tuning; gpt; llama; llms; mixtral; overfitting
• ISSN: 2224-087X; 2224-0888; 2224-0888
• DOI: 10.30970/eli.30.3

Background. Building upon previous research, this study conducts an exploration into Large Language Models (LLMs), with an emphasis on the fine-tuning and assessment of LLaMA-3.1 for instructional tasks. LLaMA-3.1, which is a new generation model and has gained considerable recognition based on its superior performance on various benchmarks. Besides assessing the disparities and improvements between the base and the fine-tuned versions of LLaMA-3.1 on an instruction dataset, the study also addresses the concern of overfitting with LLaMA-3.1. Furthermore, it carries out a comparison between LLaMA-3.1 and both its predecessor, LLaMA-2, and another LLM known as Mixtral, thereby providing a more comprehensive picture of LLaMA-3.1's capabilities compared to other models. Materials and Methods. The fine-tuning of LLaMA-3.1 employed state-of-the-art techniques, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), on comprehensive instruction datasets. Acknowledging the resource-intensive nature of LLM fine-tuning, optimization measures were taken. The fine-tuning process was additionally enhanced using Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU (graphics processing unit) instances. All the models were fine-tuned using Hugging Face and PyTorch platforms for optimal performance. Results and Discussion. The results obtained from fine-tuning and evaluating LLaMA-3.1 offer valuable insights into how this model performs with specific tasks. The evaluation framework proved helpful in the efficient assessment assessing LLMs' performance concerning instruction tasks. The research highlights the importance of evaluation for LLM applications. It shows that not always is fine-tuning a good choice, due to the nature of the model and the specifics of the task. It highlights the overfitting problem. Conclusion. The close examination of LLaMA-3.1 contributes to the field of machine learning by offering insights into how this model works and its possible fine-tuning for special tasks. The findings of this research create opportunities for more in-depth studies around the application of LLMs. It highlights the importance of efficient evaluation with already designed metrics.