llama.cpp VS alpaca-lora

> The benchmark prompt was:

> Write a compact Python function that parses a unified diff and returns the changed file paths. Then explain two edge cases.

> Each benchmark generated about 128 tokens.

Generating 128 tokens is probably not enough for good benchmark results. MTP speedup depends on how often the predicted tokens are accepted. In my experience, the very early output has a higher acceptance rate, so short testing can give false positive speedups.

Also llama.cpp includes a tool specifically for benchmarking:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/llam...

In my build, MTP came from mainline llama.cpp, not ik_llama. ik_llama got me to ~47 (engine + quant), but I couldn't get MTP running there — my build rejected the -mtp flags and ignored the model's nextn tensors. Mainline llama.cpp added MTP fairly recently (PR #22673, merged 2026-05-16), and that's where it worked for me. (There may well be an ik_llama path I missed — this is just what got it going on my box.)

That script grew up. Today I'm releasing LlamaStash, the first public release of a fast, cross-platform, terminal-native launcher for llama.cpp with zero overhead.

LlamaStash spawns the unmodified upstream llama-server. So three different questions follow from that, and there is a benchmark suite for each.

llama.cpp includes a benchmarking tool called llama-bench https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/llam...

ik_llama includes llama-sweep-bench https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp/blob/main/examples...

When comparing hardware, the output of these tools is very helpful to let others put it into context. The post says the output is "reading speed" but knowing the prefill and token generation speeds would be a lot more helpful.

lol the same way we implement all of the reduced precision fp8, fp4 types today: by storing them in the corresponding uint:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15095

# Build llama.cpp with Metal backend git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp cd llama.cpp && cmake -B build -DGGML_METAL=ON && cmake --build build -j # Community-quantized GGUFs (Google ships safetensors; unsloth ships GGUF) huggingface-cli download unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF \ gemma-4-31B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf --local-dir . huggingface-cli download unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF \ gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf --local-dir . # Benchmark: 200 generations of 512 tokens, log per-call timing ./build/bin/llama-bench -m gemma-4-31B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf -n 512 -r 200 -o json > dense.json ./build/bin/llama-bench -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf -n 512 -r 200 -o json > moe.json

Here is a example: https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py

In this blog post, I want to make it as simple as possible to fine-tune the LLaMA 2 - 7B model, using as little code as possible. We will be using the Alpaca Lora Training script, which automates the process of fine-tuning the model and for GPU we will be using Beam.

Implement the code in Llama LoRA repo in a script we can run locally

Hi all - relatively new to GitHub / programming in general, and I wanted to try to set up Alpaca Lora locally. Following the guide here: https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora

Follow up the popular work of u/tloen alpaca-lora, I wrapped the setup of alpaca_lora_4bit to add support for GPTQ training in form of installable pip packages. You can perform training and inference with multiple quantizations method to compare the results.

If instead you want to apply a LoRa to a pytorch model, a lot of people use this script to apply to LoRa to the 16 bit model and then quantize it with a GPTQ program afterwards https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/export_hf_checkpoint.py

There are a few papers on watermarking LLM output, but from what I have seen they all use complex methods of detection to allow the watermark to go unseen by the end user, only to be detected by algorithm. I believe that a more overt system of watermarking might also be beneficial. One simple method that I have tried is character substitution. For this model, I LORA finetuned openlm-research/open_llama_3b on the alpaca_data_cleaned_archive.json dataset from https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/ modified by replacing all instances of the "." character in the outputs with a "ι" The results are pretty good, with the correct the correct substitutions being generated by the model in most cases. It doesn't always work, but this was only a LORA training and for two epochs of 400 steps each, and 100% substitution isn't really required.

I am kind of new to finetuning LLM's and am not able to understand what this option exactly refers to. I guess it has the same meaning as the "train_on_inputs" parameter of alpacalora though.

Read the paper and also: https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora