safetensors VS alpaca_lora_4bit

The ML field is doing work in that area: https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors

FYI the file format, safetensors, was proposed, developed and maintained by HF, and involved people from groups such as Eleuther and Stability for external security audits.

https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors https://huggingface.co/blog/safetensors-security-audit

Thank you for note on this. I had not heard there were already trojan horse malware being slipped into tensor files as python scripts. Apparently torch pickle uses eval on the tensor file with no filter.

Heard surprisingly little commentary on this topic. The full explanation of how Safetensors are "Safe" can be found from the developer at: https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors/discussions/111

Here the developer goes into some detail about what kinds of protections .safetensor files have : https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors/discussions/111

Use the safetensors format, which allows safe persistence and loading of models for common libraries - TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, etc. We went through external audits in the last few months (blog post). The current direction will be to have this as the default format.

I've been diving in lately and while it's not efficient, the only way to do manage is to create a new conda/mamba environment, or a custom Docker image for all the conflicting packages.

For safety and speed, you should prefer the safetensor format: https://huggingface.co/docs/safetensors/speed

If you know what you are doing you can do your own conversions: https://github.com/huggingface/safetensors or for safety, https://huggingface.co/spaces/diffusers/convert

GitHub - huggingface/safetensors: Simple, safe way to store and distribute tensors

For training there is also https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit

I've been trying to fine tune an erotica model on some large context chat history (reverse proxy logs) and a literotica-instruct dataset I made, with a max context of 8k. The large context size eats a lot of VRAM so I've been trying to find the most efficient way to experiment considering I'd like to do multiple runs to test some ideas. So I'm going to try and use https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit, which is supposed to train faster and use less memory than qlora.

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.

" Using LoRAs with GPTQ-for-LLaMa This requires using a monkey patch that is supported by this web UI: https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit"

4-bit GPTQ LoRA training was available since early April. I did not see any comparison to it in the QLoRA paper or even a mention, so it makes me think they were not aware it already existed.

https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit is still the SOTA - Faster than qlora, trains on a GPTQ base.

I would also like to know how one would finetune this in 4 bit? I think one could take the merged 8K PEFT with the LLaMA weights, and then quantize it to 4 bit, and then train with https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit ?

I was under the impression that you just git clone this repo into text-generation-webui/repositories (so you would have GPTQ_for_Llama and alpaca_lora_4bit in the folder), and then just load with monkey patch. Is that not correct? I also tried just downloading alpaca_lora_4bit on its own, git cloning text-gen-webui within it, and installing requirements.txt for both and running with monkey patch. I was following the sections of alpaca_lora_4bit, "Text Generation Webui Monkey Patch" and "monkey patch inside webui"

I dont have any familiarity with esxi, but I can say that there are quite a few posts about people doing it on proxmox. I've currently got a machine with 2x3090 passing through to VM's. When I'm training, I pass them both through to the same VM and can do lora 4-bit training on llama33 using https://github.com/johnsmith0031/alpaca_lora_4bit. Then, at inference time, I run a single card into a different VM, and have an extra card available for experimentation.