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name: sft-and-pretraining description: "Guides agents creating Axolotl SFT and continual pretraining configs, LoRA or QLoRA recipes, preprocessing workflows, checkpoint resumes, sample packing, and stability triage." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: Apache 2.0

SFT and Pretraining

Use this sub-skill when the task is to fine-tune with Axolotl using supervised fine-tuning, adapt a pretraining recipe, create a LoRA or QLoRA starter config, debug SFT/pretraining loss behavior, reason about checkpoint resume fields, or decide whether to run preprocessing before training.

Axolotl is config-driven: produce or edit a YAML config first, validate it, then use the same config with axolotl preprocess, axolotl train, axolotl inference, and axolotl merge-lora as appropriate.

Read First

• references/workflows.md for SFT, completion-style pretraining, streaming pretraining, validation order, and checkpoint/resume workflow.
• references/training-options.md for LoRA/QLoRA/full fine-tune choices, core config fields, packing, batch sizing, output fields, and preprocessing reuse.
• references/troubleshooting.md for NaN/loss spikes, OOM, tokenizer mismatch, packing length issues, dataset-prepared reuse, checkpoint confusion, and network/model path problems.
• scripts/make_minimal_sft_config.py for a safe local helper that emits a starter SFT YAML without downloading models, loading datasets, or starting training.

Route Boundaries

• Use this sub-skill for default SFT, chat-template/input-output/completion training flow, continual pretraining, minimal config construction, axolotl preprocess before expensive runs, output_dir, checkpoints, resume, dataset_prepared_path, and SFT/pretraining stability triage.
• Route dataset schema details, custom field mappings, and prompt-format mechanics to data-and-configs.
• Route DPO, IPO, KTO, ORPO, SimPO, reward modeling, GRPO, and EBFT to preference-tuning or rl-and-rewards.
• Route model architecture quirks, tokenizer/model loading internals, LoRA target-module internals, and adapter compatibility to model-loading-and-adapters.
• Route DeepSpeed/FSDP launch topology, throughput tuning, vLLM serving, and distributed performance to distributed-and-performance.
• Route complete CLI catalog, installation, fetching examples, inference UI, and operational command details to cli-and-operations.

Quick Workflow

1. Pick the workflow: SFT via datasets, non-streaming pretraining via datasets: [{type: completion}], or streaming pretraining via pretraining_dataset.
2. Choose the training mode: LoRA for a common adapter baseline, QLoRA for 4-bit memory pressure, or full fine-tune when all weights should update and hardware allows it.
3. Create a config with base_model, dataset source/type, output_dir, sequence/batch settings, optimizer/LR, precision, checkpoint fields, and adapter fields when needed.
4. Run axolotl preprocess <config.yaml> for non-streaming data when you want to validate tokenization, label masking, or reusable dataset_prepared_path before training.
5. Run axolotl preprocess <config.yaml> --debug when label masking, chat template behavior, or empty/overlong examples are suspected.
6. Only after validation, run axolotl train <config.yaml> in the user’s prepared Axolotl environment.

For a starter YAML, use:

python sub-skills/sft-and-pretraining/scripts/make_minimal_sft_config.py \
  --base-model NousResearch/Llama-3.2-1B \
  --dataset-path ./chat.jsonl \
  --dataset-type chat_template \
  --adapter qlora \
  --output-dir ./outputs/chat-qlora

The helper only writes YAML to standard output or to a requested file; it does not inspect models, access the network, load datasets, or train.