BrewSLM Academy · learning hub for ML engineers
Learn to fine-tune and ship small language models.
The Academy is the single learning surface for BrewSLM: a technical course and tutorial hub for machine learning and LLM engineers who want to understand base models, supervised fine-tuning, LoRA, custom datasets, evaluation, and the path from first run to production-ready small language models.
New here or upskilling from broader ML work? Start with the small language model roadmap for ML engineers.
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The absolute basics
What a model is, how it learns, tokens, the Transformer, and what a language model actually does.
- What is a model?
- How models learn: loss & gradient descent
- Neural networks in one page
- From text to numbers: tokens & embeddings
- Attention & the Transformer, gently
- How language models work: next-token prediction
- Pretraining vs fine-tuning vs prompting vs RAG
- LLMs vs SLMs: scale, cost, latency
- The mental model of an SLM project
- Base vs instruct models
- Picking a base model
- From n-grams to Transformers
- Architecture taxonomy
The why & what of fine-tuning
Datasets, chat templates, tokenization, the training loop, cross-entropy, LoRA, and evaluation.
- What is Supervised Fine-Tuning?
- Choosing the objective: SFT, DPO, ORPO, RLHF
- Anatomy of an SFT example: the loss mask
- Chat templates & special tokens
- Task shapes
- Tokenization in practice
- Data quality I: dedup, balance, splits
- Data quality II: gold sets
- The training loop, step by step
- Cross-entropy loss for token prediction
- Learning rate, schedules, warmup
- Batch size & gradient accumulation
- Full fine-tuning vs LoRA
- LoRA knobs: rank, alpha, QLoRA
- GPU memory math
- OOM and how to survive it
- Overfitting & reading a loss curve
- Evaluation that matches the task
- Decoding controls: temperature, top-p, stop tokens
- Dataset formats in the wild
- Continued pretraining
- Catastrophic forgetting
Fine-tune by hand in PyTorch
Load SmolLM2, build a dataset, write a minimal LoRA training loop, evaluate, and ship an artifact — runnable code, nothing hidden.
- Set up the environment
- Load a base model + tokenizer
- Build a tiny SFT dataset
- Tokenize & collate: model-ready batches
- A minimal LoRA fine-tune with the Trainer
- Run it: read the logs, loss, checkpoints
- Evaluate by hand: run the gold set
- Merge the adapter, run inference, ship
- Capstone A: fine-tune end-to-end by hand
- SFT with TRL's SFTTrainer (20 lines)
- QLoRA hands-on with bitsandbytes
- Real metrics with sklearn & HF evaluate
- Structured outputs with pydantic
- Multi-turn chat SFT
- Project gallery: 6 SLM use cases
- LLM-as-a-judge
- Public benchmarks & lm-eval-harness
- Experiment tracking with MLflow & W&B
The same pipeline, automated
Re-run your by-hand fine-tune through BrewSLM's eleven-stage lifecycle across the workspace's Data, Train, Results and Ship destinations: import, recipes, the trainability forecast, training jobs, pass/fail rules (eval packs), auto-RAG, and deployment.
- From script to platform: the lifecycle
- Ingest & map with per-row accountability
- Synthetic data & the review queue
- Clean & prepare: the manifest
- Recipes & task handlers
- Preflight & the trainability forecast
- Train: jobs, the bell & the baseline curve
- Eval packs, gates & failure clusters
- When not to fine-tune: auto-RAG & reroute
- Capstone B: export, deploy & Coach
- Reference: training config (brewslm.yaml)
- Reference: RunEvent & Coach catalogue
- Reference: eval pack & failure cluster
Beyond a single run
Distillation, preference tuning (DPO/ORPO), quantization & compression, multi-task & curriculum, serving, and production observability.
- Beyond a single SFT run: the toolkit
- Distillation I: the teacher & capturing logits
- Distillation II: the KD loss
- Distillation III: quality retained
- Preference tuning: DPO & ORPO
- Quantization & compression
- Multi-task training & curriculum
- Serving & inference optimization
- Observability & drift in production
- Capstone C: choosing the technique & graduating
- Production feedback loop
- Tool-use / function-calling fine-tuning
- Structured pruning
- Speculative decoding
- Reasoning training
Ship real projects
Hands-on, complete walkthroughs of common BrewSLM use cases — support FAQ, SQL injection classifier, invoice extraction, ticket triage. Each one takes you from "I have a CSV" to "I have a deployed model" in ~2 hours.
- Tutorial 0 — Set up BrewSLM (start here)
- Support FAQ assistant with rag-protocol
- SQL injection classifier (security)
- Invoice field extraction (structured)
- Customer ticket triage (multi-class)
- Internal KB QA (qa-sft path)
- Code review nitpicker
- PII span tagging (safety)
- Legal contracts via a custom domain pack
- Building domain packs — deep reference (finance / AP)