How the machines work

Member lesson

Training, fine-tuning and adapters

Lesson 6 of 13 in How the machines work.

What is Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) | explained by the inventor · Edward Hu
Lesson

Almost nobody trains a model from scratch, and you will never need to. What a studio does is adapt one. Feed a pre-trained model twenty photographs of a bottle and a short training run teaches it what that bottle is, so it can be asked for the bottle on a beach without the shape drifting.

A person kneels beside a giant old camera whose lens is as big as a barrel. They are screwing a thin filter ring onto the front of the lens and hold a second filter in their other hand, ready to add on top.
The huge lens is the model. The thin filters are adapters: small, cheap, trained on your own work.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “The original enormous run. Months, thousands of processors, a bill in the millions.”

    • Head
    • Pre-training
    • Vision model
    • Latent
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Continuing training on a smaller, specific set so the model leans your way.”

    • Transformer
    • Multimodal
    • Conditioning
    • Fine-tuning
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A small add-on trained instead of the whole model. Megabytes rather than gigabytes, and the reason custom looks are affordable.”

    • Fine-tuning
    • Benchmark
    • Embedding
    • LoRA

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