Company
Date Published
Author
Phat Vo and Isaac Chung
Word count
1138
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to handle specialized domains like medical or legal fields by injecting domain-specific knowledge through techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or fine-tuning. This blog post introduces and evaluates a fine-tuning method called Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT), which enhances LLMs by leveraging generated Chain of Thought (CoT) responses to improve reasoning and answer generation capabilities in specialized domains. RAFT refines pre-trained models by generating high-quality CoT answers with a large model and then fine-tuning these answers on smaller, specialized models, bridging the gap between general-purpose LLMs and the specialized knowledge needed for specific fields. Experiments with models like Llama2-7B and Llama3-8B demonstrate significant performance improvements, with RAFT consistently outperforming RAG methods. Additionally, the method is efficient, requiring less data and computational resources, making it feasible for compute-constrained environments. The cost-effectiveness and scalability of RAFT suggest its potential for broader application, with ongoing evaluations exploring its performance on newer models and possible deployment on platforms like Clarifai.