Fine-Tuning Mistral-7B with QLoRA
LLM
AI
Python
Fine-tuning large language models used to require expensive GPU clusters. With QLoRA (Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation), you can now fine-tune a 7B parameter model on a single RTX 3090.
What is QLoRA?
QLoRA combines 4-bit quantization with Low-Rank Adaptation to dramatically reduce memory requirements while maintaining model quality.
My Setup
- Base model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2
- Dataset: Custom philosophical Q&A pairs
- Hardware: RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM)
- Training time: ~4 hours for 1000 samples
Results
The fine-tuned model showed significant improvement in domain-specific tasks while retaining general capabilities. The key is choosing high-quality training data over quantity.