Mastering Fine-Tuning Parameters for deep learning models and LLMs

A Key to Acing AI Interviews

During my experience interviewing AI and Generative AI Engineers, one observation
consistently stands out: many candidates struggle to explain the purpose and significance of
fine-tuning parameters with clarity. These parameters are not just numbers or settings—
they’re the foundation of creating emcient, accurate, and contextually relevant models.

Understanding these parameters is crucial, not only for fine-tuning tasks but also to
showcase your expertise during interviews. Here’s a quick overview of some essential
parameters and their significance:

1. Learning Rate

The learning rate controls how much to adjust the model’s weights in response to the
computed error during back propagation. It essentially determines the size of the steps taken
towards minimizing the loss function.

Signiflcance:
A high learning rate can lead to rapid progress initially but risks overshooting the
optimal point, causing instability or divergence.
A low learning rate ensures that the optimization is stable but may result in slower
convergence, requiring more epochs to achieve good performance.
Striking the right balance is crucial to achieving emcient and effective model training.
Example:
For fine-tuning pre-trained models like BERT or GPT, learning rates in the range of 2e-5
to 5e-5 are commonly used.
For pre-training models from scratch, a larger learning rate such as 1e-4 might be
suitable initially.
Optimal Value: Typically starts low for fine-tuning (e.g., 3e-5) and decays over time using
schedulers like cosine decay or linear warmup.

2. Batch Size

The batch size specifies the number of training examples used to calculate the gradient in one
iteration.

Signiflcance:
Small batch sizes (e.g., 16) introduce noise to the gradient, which can help the model
generalize better but may slow down convergence.
Large batch sizes (e.g., 128 or 256) stabilize the gradient estimates, enabling faster
training but requiring significant memory resources and potentially leading to less
generalization.
Example:
For fine-tuning tasks, batch sizes of 16 or 32 are common due to GPU memory
constraints.
 Pretraining large-scale models often uses batch sizes in the thousands, distributed
across multiple GPUs.
Optimal Value: Typically 16–64 for fine-tuning, adjusted based on memory availability
and the size of the dataset.

3. Number of Epochs

An epoch is a complete pass through the entire training dataset. The number of epochs
determines how many times the model sees each training example.

Signiflcance:
Too few epochs can result in under fitting, where the model fails to learn the
underlying patterns in the data.
Too many epochs can cause over-fitting, where the model memorizes the training data
but performs poorly on unseen data.
The key is to train the model just enough to capture the relevant patterns without
over-fitting.
Example:
Fine-tuning BERT for text classification tasks often requires 3–5 epochs.
Pretraining GPT-style models may require 10–20 epochs or more, depending on
dataset size and complexity.
Optimal Value: Task-dependent; early stopping based on validation loss is a common
strategy to avoid over-fitting.

4. Weight Decay

Weight decay adds a penalty to large weights during training, encouraging the model to prefer
simpler solutions.

Signiflcance:
Helps prevent over-fitting by discouraging the model from relying too heavily on
specific features.
Improves generalization by promoting smoother decision boundaries.
Example:
In the AdamW optimizer, weight decay is applied directly to the weights, with values
like 0.01 being common for fine-tuning tasks.
Optimal Value: Typically between 0.01–0.1 for transformer models.

5. Dropout Rate

Dropout involves randomly deactivating a fraction of neurons during each training iteration
to reduce over-reliance on specific features.

Signiflcance:
Prevents over-fitting by forcing the model to learn redundant representations.
Enhances robustness by ensuring that no single neuron becomes overly critical to
predictions.
Example:
 A dropout rate of 0.1–0.3 is standard in transformer models like BERT and GPT.
Optimal Value:
Lower rates (0.1–0.2) are better for large datasets.
Higher rates (0.3–0.5) may be used for smaller datasets to counteract over-fitting.

6. Warmup Steps

During warmup, the learning rate is gradually increased from zero to its initial value over a
predefined number of steps.

Signiflcance:
Stabilizes training by preventing large weight updates at the start.
Avoids early divergence, especially when the model weights are randomly initialized.
Example:
Warmup steps are often set as a fraction of total training steps, e.g., 500–1000 for
fine-tuning tasks.
Optimal Value: Typically 5–10% of the total training steps.

7. Gradient Clipping

Gradient clipping caps the magnitude of gradients to a predefined threshold, preventing

excessively large updates.

Signiflcance:
Addresses the issue of exploding gradients, which can destabilize training.
Particularly important for deep networks like transformers, where gradients can grow
exponentially.
Example:
Clipping gradients to a norm of 1.0 is a common practice in LLMs.
Optimal Value: A threshold of 1.0 is widely used and works well for most tasks.

8. Sequence Length (Max Tokens)

The maximum number of tokens (words, sub-words, or characters) the model processes in
each input example.

Signiflcance:
Determines the amount of context the model can handle.
Longer sequences allow for capturing more context but increase computational cost.
Truncated sequences may miss critical information, affecting task performance.
Example:
Sequence lengths of 128–512 tokens are typical for classification tasks.
Summarization or long-context tasks may require lengths up to 2048 tokens or more.
Optimal Value: Depends on task requirements; balance between capturing context and
memory constraints.

9. Optimizer
The optimizer defines the algorithm for updating model weights based on gradients.

Signiflcance:
Impacts the speed and stability of convergence.
Modern optimizers like AdamW include enhancements for better performance in deep
learning.
Example:
AdamW is a default choice for transformers, with hyper-parameters like β1=0.9,
β2=0.999, and ε=1e-8.
Optimal Value: AdamW with default settings often works well for LLMs.

10. Loss Function

The loss function measures the error between predictions and true labels, guiding the
optimization process.

Signiflcance:
A well-chosen loss function aligns with the task objectives.
For classification tasks, cross-entropy loss is standard; for regression tasks, mean
squared error is common.
Example:
Fine-tuning a token classification model like LayoutLMv3 uses cross-entropy loss.
Sequence-to-sequence models often include label smoothing to improve
generalization.

These parameters, when well-understood, empower you to troubleshoot issues, explain

decisions, and optimize your models effectively. For example, knowing when to increase the
dropout rate to handle over-fitting or tweak the learning rate to escape a plateau can be
game-changing.

Fine-tuning is as much about understanding why these parameters matter as it is about

getting them right. Taking the time to learn their significance reflects your depth of
understanding and problem-solving ability—qualities that make you stand out as a candidate.