AI 102: Fine-Tuning and Transfer Learning
Welcome to AI 102, where we’ll explore the concepts of Transfer Learning and Fine-Tuning. These techniques are critical when you want to teach a pre-trained model, like LLaMA or GPT, to handle specific tasks like financial analysis. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into these topics, discuss practical applications, and explore why VRAM efficiency is essential. What is Transfer Learning? Imagine you’ve been learning about general knowledge for years. You’ve studied a little bit of everything: history, math, and science. Now, let’s say you want to specialize in finance. You wouldn’t start by relearning basic math—you already know that! Instead, you would build on top of what you already know and apply it to finance. This is what transfer learning does for AI models. Large models like GPT or LLaMA are pre-trained on vast amounts of general data. When you want them to perform a specialized task—like analyzing financial data—you don’t start training them from scratch. Instead, you transfer their existing knowledge and teach them the nuances of finance. Analogy: Think of transfer learning as taking a generally knowledgeable student and refining their expertise in a specific field, like finance, without starting from square one. What is Fine-Tuning? Fine-tuning takes this process a step further. Imagine that student has now started specializing in finance. But, to master specific tasks—like understanding market trends—you give them more focused material. You provide datasets that are directly relevant to what they need to learn, polishing their skills. In AI, fine-tuning means taking a pre-trained model and continuing its training on a smaller, specialized dataset to make it excel in a particular domain. This is especially useful in fields like finance, where models need to understand specific terms, behaviors, and trends. Fine-tuning allows the model to adapt to your specific dataset without having to learn everything from scratch. Example: Let’s say you want a model to predict stock prices based on historical data. First, you use transfer learning to teach the model general financial concepts, like how stock markets work. Then, you fine-tune the model with historical price data, adjusting it to specialize in predicting price movements.