---
name: finetuning-pipeline
description: Run a reproducible data-to-SFT-to-DPO-to-serve fine-tuning pipeline with ablations, quantization, and a 2026 Model Openness Framework model card.
version: 1.0.0
phase: 19
lesson: 07
tags: [capstone, fine-tuning, axolotl, trl, dpo, grpo, vllm, eagle-3, mof]
---

Given a base model (Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen3 14B, or Gemma 3 12B) and a task-specific dataset, build a single-command pipeline that produces a served endpoint and a reproducible model card.

Build plan:

1. Data stage: Datatrove dedup, Nemotron-CC-style quality filter, Presidio PII scrub, seeded train/val splits.
2. Contamination check: MinHashLSH against MMLU-Pro, MT-Bench-v2, RewardBench-2. Reject on overlap.
3. SFT: Axolotl v0.8 with ZeRO-3, Flash Attention 3, packed sequences, 2-3 epochs on 8xH100.
4. Preference tuning: TRL 0.15 DPO (or GRPO with verifiable rewards) for 1 epoch, beta sweep.
5. Quantize: GPTQ-INT4-Marlin + AWQ-INT4 + GGUF-Q4_K_M.
6. Serve: vLLM 0.7 with EAGLE-3 speculative decoding (draft heads via Red Hat Speculators or SGLang SpecForge). K8s deployment with HPA on queue-wait.
7. Eval: lm-evaluation-harness, RewardBench-2, MT-Bench-v2, MMLU-Pro across base/SFT-only/SFT+DPO/SFT+GRPO.
8. Safety: Llama Guard 4 pass rate, ShieldGemma-2 output filter.
9. Model card under 2026 Model Openness Framework with data, training, eval, safety, reproducibility sections.

Assessment rubric:

| Weight | Criterion | Measurement |
|:-:|---|---|
| 25 | Eval delta vs base | Measured gain on MMLU-Pro, MT-Bench-v2, task-specific benchmarks |
| 20 | Pipeline reproducibility | One-command rerun with identical seeds yields matching hashes |
| 20 | Data hygiene | Dedup rate, PII scrub coverage, contamination check green |
| 20 | Serving efficiency | tokens/s at batch 1/8/32, EAGLE-3 acceptance, $/1M tokens |
| 15 | Model card + safety eval | 2026 MOF completeness + Llama Guard 4 pass rate |

Hard rejects:

- Pipelines that skip the MinHash contamination check. Leaking MMLU-Pro into training is the classic eval-cheating failure mode.
- Training runs without seeds or YAMLs attached. Reproducibility is a hard requirement.
- Serving without EAGLE-3 or an equivalent speculative decoding configuration. Baseline tokens/s is not the 2026 bar.
- Missing safety eval. Every fine-tune ships with a Llama Guard 4 pass rate.

Refusal rules:

- Refuse to publish a model card that claims benchmark scores without attaching the lm-eval-harness commit SHA.
- Refuse to fine-tune on data whose license forbids derivative models. MOF grades data licensing.
- Refuse to ship a quantized model without measuring quality loss on the eval matrix.

Output: a repo containing the pipeline orchestrator, the YAMLs for Llama 3.1 8B + one alternate base, the SFT and DPO W&B run logs, the quantized artifacts, the served endpoint, the three-benchmark eval matrix, the safety eval, the 2026 MOF model card, and a write-up on the three largest data-hygiene issues you caught and fixed.