axolotl
This Claude Code skill provides expert guidance for fine-tuning large language models using Axolotl, an open-source framework. It covers YAML configuration setup, support for over 100 models, training techniques like LoRA/QLoRA and advanced optimization methods (DPO, KTO, ORPO, GRPO), multimodal capabilities, distributed training with FSDP, and best practices for model compression and inference optimization. Use this skill when configuring Axolotl training jobs, debugging training code, implementing specialized fine-tuning approaches, or optimizing distributed training performance across multiple GPUs.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs /tmp/axolotl && cp -r /tmp/axolotl/03-fine-tuning/axolotl ~/.claude/skills/axolotlSKILL.md
# Axolotl Skill
Comprehensive assistance with axolotl development, generated from official documentation.
## When to Use This Skill
This skill should be triggered when:
- Working with axolotl
- Asking about axolotl features or APIs
- Implementing axolotl solutions
- Debugging axolotl code
- Learning axolotl best practices
## Quick Reference
### Common Patterns
**Pattern 1:** To validate that acceptable data transfer speeds exist for your training job, running NCCL Tests can help pinpoint bottlenecks, for example:
```
./build/all_reduce_perf -b 8 -e 128M -f 2 -g 3
```
**Pattern 2:** Configure your model to use FSDP in the Axolotl yaml. For example:
```
fsdp_version: 2
fsdp_config:
offload_params: true
state_dict_type: FULL_STATE_DICT
auto_wrap_policy: TRANSFORMER_BASED_WRAP
transformer_layer_cls_to_wrap: LlamaDecoderLayer
reshard_after_forward: true
```
**Pattern 3:** The context_parallel_size should be a divisor of the total number of GPUs. For example:
```
context_parallel_size
```
**Pattern 4:** For example: - With 8 GPUs and no sequence parallelism: 8 different batches processed per step - With 8 GPUs and context_parallel_size=4: Only 2 different batches processed per step (each split across 4 GPUs) - If your per-GPU micro_batch_size is 2, the global batch size decreases from 16 to 4
```
context_parallel_size=4
```
**Pattern 5:** Setting save_compressed: true in your configuration enables saving models in a compressed format, which: - Reduces disk space usage by approximately 40% - Maintains compatibility with vLLM for accelerated inference - Maintains compatibility with llmcompressor for further optimization (example: quantization)
```
save_compressed: true
```
**Pattern 6:** Note It is not necessary to place your integration in the integrations folder. It can be in any location, so long as it’s installed in a package in your python env. See this repo for an example: https://github.com/axolotl-ai-cloud/diff-transformer
```
integrations
```
**Pattern 7:** Handle both single-example and batched data. - single example: sample[‘input_ids’] is a list[int] - batched data: sample[‘input_ids’] is a list[list[int]]
```
utils.trainer.drop_long_seq(sample, sequence_len=2048, min_sequence_len=2)
```
### Example Code Patterns
**Example 1** (python):
```python
cli.cloud.modal_.ModalCloud(config, app=None)
```
**Example 2** (python):
```python
cli.cloud.modal_.run_cmd(cmd, run_folder, volumes=None)
```
**Example 3** (python):
```python
core.trainers.base.AxolotlTrainer(
*_args,
bench_data_collator=None,
eval_data_collator=None,
dataset_tags=None,
**kwargs,
)
```
**Example 4** (python):
```python
core.trainers.base.AxolotlTrainer.log(logs, start_time=None)
```
**Example 5** (python):
```python
prompt_strategies.input_output.RawInputOutputPrompter()
```
## Reference Files
This skill includes comprehensive documentation in `references/`:
- **api.md** - Api documentation
- **dataset-formats.md** - Dataset-Formats documentation
- **other.md** - Other documentation
Use `view` to read specific reference files when detailed information is needed.
## Working with This Skill
### For Beginners
Start with the getting_started or tutorials reference files for foundational concepts.
### For Specific Features
Use the appropriate category reference file (api, guides, etc.) for detailed information.
### For Code Examples
The quick reference section above contains common patterns extracted from the official docs.
## Resources
### references/
Organized documentation extracted from official sources. These files contain:
- Detailed explanations
- Code examples with language annotations
- Links to original documentation
- Table of contents for quick navigation
### scripts/
Add helper scripts here for common automation tasks.
### assets/
Add templates, boilerplate, or example projects here.
## Notes
- This skill was automatically generated from official documentation
- Reference files preserve the structure and examples from source docs
- Code examples include language detection for better syntax highlighting
- Quick reference patterns are extracted from common usage examples in the docs
## Updating
To refresh this skill with updated documentation:
1. Re-run the scraper with the same configuration
2. The skill will be rebuilt with the latest informationOrchestrates end-to-end autonomous AI research projects using a two-loop architecture. The inner loop runs rapid experiment iterations with clear optimization targets. The outer loop synthesizes results, identifies patterns, and steers research direction. Routes to domain-specific skills for execution, supports continuous agent operation via Claude Code /loop and OpenClaw heartbeat, and produces research presentations and papers. Use when starting a research project, running autonomous experiments, or managing a multi-hypothesis research effort.
Implements and trains LLMs using Lightning AI's LitGPT with 20+ pretrained architectures (Llama, Gemma, Phi, Qwen, Mistral). Use when need clean model implementations, educational understanding of architectures, or production fine-tuning with LoRA/QLoRA. Single-file implementations, no abstraction layers.
State-space model with O(n) complexity vs Transformers' O(n²). 5× faster inference, million-token sequences, no KV cache. Selective SSM with hardware-aware design. Mamba-1 (d_state=16) and Mamba-2 (d_state=128, multi-head). Models 130M-2.8B on HuggingFace.
Educational GPT implementation in ~300 lines. Reproduces GPT-2 (124M) on OpenWebText. Clean, hackable code for learning transformers. By Andrej Karpathy. Perfect for understanding GPT architecture from scratch. Train on Shakespeare (CPU) or OpenWebText (multi-GPU).
RNN+Transformer hybrid with O(n) inference. Linear time, infinite context, no KV cache. Train like GPT (parallel), infer like RNN (sequential). Linux Foundation AI project. Production at Windows, Office, NeMo. RWKV-7 (March 2025). Models up to 14B parameters.
Provides PyTorch-native distributed LLM pretraining using torchtitan with 4D parallelism (FSDP2, TP, PP, CP). Use when pretraining Llama 3.1, DeepSeek V3, or custom models at scale from 8 to 512+ GPUs with Float8, torch.compile, and distributed checkpointing.
Fast tokenizers optimized for research and production. Rust-based implementation tokenizes 1GB in <20 seconds. Supports BPE, WordPiece, and Unigram algorithms. Train custom vocabularies, track alignments, handle padding/truncation. Integrates seamlessly with transformers. Use when you need high-performance tokenization or custom tokenizer training.
Language-independent tokenizer treating text as raw Unicode. Supports BPE and Unigram algorithms. Fast (50k sentences/sec), lightweight (6MB memory), deterministic vocabulary. Used by T5, ALBERT, XLNet, mBART. Train on raw text without pre-tokenization. Use when you need multilingual support, CJK languages, or reproducible tokenization.