Fine-tuning lab
Set data rights and rollback boundaries
Page 7 advances one concrete LoRA adapter for support-tone behavior: explain the decision, run the code, inspect failure, measure evidence, and keep only what is ready to ship.
Before you start
Why this matters
Predict whether a client-supplied authority field can safely drive the LoRA adapter for support-tone behavior. Which negative test proves the boundary?
1Learn the idea
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Build focus
Before release, define what the artifact refuses to do. Validate ranges, minimize retained data, pin the reviewed configuration, and assign an owner who can disable the feature. Safety is implemented at the boundary and release process; it is not a warning paragraph placed after an unsafe function.
Training data needs rights and PII review. Rollback must unload the adapter without redeploying the universe. Owners approve dataset expansion.
The artifact's user-facing goal is specific: stabilize response format and tone with LoRA while leaving facts to retrieval. Its accepted input is curated instruction examples split by intent into train, validation, and held-out test. Those statements are intentionally narrower than “build an AI system.” Narrow scope lets us inspect every input and expected result, and it prevents a toy result from being presented as a production claim. System shape for this chapter: a curated dataset is split by intent and source into train, validation, and untouched test sets; a pinned instruct model receives a low-rank adapter; evaluation compares base, prompt-only, and adapted outputs; serving loads the adapter as a versioned artifact beside retrieval. Keep model calls behind adapters, keep authorization and validation in deterministic code, and carry stable IDs and versions through every response. That separation lets you decide whether a bad result came from input handling, retrieval, inference, validation, or deployment. This page's job is the safety and operations step: before release, define what the artifact refuses to do. Setup baseline for the chapter (run once per machine, not secrets in git):
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
# Training stack varies by GPU; pin versions in requirements.
pip install pyyaml
mkdir -p data/train data/val data/test adapters
If hardware or a hosted provider differs, preserve the interface and expected behavior. Do not present provider syntax as universal—when a vendor adapter is unavoidable, keep it behind a thin boundary and test with a fake first. The deliverable is not “it ran once”; it is a reproducible artifact another developer can inspect, including expected output and one deliberate failure related to adapter memorizes shifting facts or regresses general quality. Operationally, write down the owner of this stage, the command you ran, the observed output, and the next page's dependency on that output. If you cannot point to a file, fixture, metric, or config key, the stage is not done. Prefer small, reviewable increments: one contract, one path, one metric, one failure, one gate. When tradeoffs appear—latency versus quality, hit rate versus false hits, local privacy versus cloud quality—record both numbers instead of moving the threshold until the report looks green. The chapter ships only when evidence for format adherence and tone scores improve vs base without factual holdout regression and a rehearsed recovery path exist beside versioned LoRA adapter loaded at serve time with ADAPTER_ID rollback.
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Run the example
Save this as lesson.py and run python3 lesson.py. Prefer the standard library or the pinned packages from the setup block so the example stays reproducible.
def license_ok(source_tags):
return all(t in {"customer_consented","synthetic_internal"} for t in source_tags)
print(license_ok(["customer_consented","random_webscrapes"]))
Expected output: False when web scrapes are included. Exact floating-point formatting may vary slightly, but the asserted behavior must not. Read the output as evidence about this stage, not merely proof that the interpreter started.
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Debug the stage
Run a negative authorization or safety test. A perfect quality score with a broken boundary must still fail the release. At the safety and operations stage, save the smallest failing fixture beside the expected result. Change one cause at a time and rerun the exact command printed above; that makes the repair reviewable and keeps this chapter's progressive artifact reproducible.
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Evaluate before continuing
Security and ops gates are blockers. Missing controls fail the ship checklist even when demos look good. For this safety and operations page, preserve the fixture and result as evidence for the next page. Label observations separately from conclusions: a passing assertion establishes the behavior it names, while broader usefulness requires the chapter's full evaluation set and stated operating limits. Primary metrics for the chapter remain format adherence and tone scores improve vs base without factual holdout regression.
Continue learning · glossary & guides
- [ ] Is there a concrete release blocker and named owner?
- [ ] Are data range, retention, and rollback rules executable?
- [ ] Can the reviewed version be identified after release?
- [ ] What does the LoRA adapter for support-tone behavior refuse to do?
Glossary: LoRA · How-to: train LoRA adapter · Cheatsheet: LoRA vs RAG · Snippet: LoRA config