Book Image

Pretrain Vision and Large Language Models in Python

By : Emily Webber
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Pretrain Vision and Large Language Models in Python

4.5 (2)
By: Emily Webber

Overview of this book

Foundation models have forever changed machine learning. From BERT to ChatGPT, CLIP to Stable Diffusion, when billions of parameters are combined with large datasets and hundreds to thousands of GPUs, the result is nothing short of record-breaking. The recommendations, advice, and code samples in this book will help you pretrain and fine-tune your own foundation models from scratch on AWS and Amazon SageMaker, while applying them to hundreds of use cases across your organization. With advice from seasoned AWS and machine learning expert Emily Webber, this book helps you learn everything you need to go from project ideation to dataset preparation, training, evaluation, and deployment for large language, vision, and multimodal models. With step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll go from mastering the concept of pretraining to preparing your dataset and model, configuring your environment, training, fine-tuning, evaluating, deploying, and optimizing your foundation models. You will learn how to apply the scaling laws to distributing your model and dataset over multiple GPUs, remove bias, achieve high throughput, and build deployment pipelines. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to embark on your own project to pretrain and fine-tune the foundation models of the future.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Before Pretraining
5
Part 2: Configure Your Environment
9
Part 3: Train Your Model
13
Part 4: Evaluate Your Model
17
Part 5: Deploy Your Model

Evaluating foundation models

As we’ve discussed many times in this book so far, the primary reason to engage in large-scale training is that open source models aren’t cutting it for you. Before you start your own large-scale training project, you should have already completed the following steps:

  1. Tested an open source model on your specific use case
  2. Identified performance gaps
  3. Fine-tuned that same open source model on a small subset of your data
  4. Identified smaller performance gaps

The point is that you should have some empirical reason to believe that the open source model solves some of your business problem but not all of it. You need to also empirically prove that small-scale fine-tuning is in the same boat; it should increase system performance but still leave room for improvement. This entire next section is about evaluating that room for improvement. Let’s try to understand how we can evaluate foundation models.

As you are no...