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Fine-Tuning & RLHF Intuition · Week 11 · Day 4/7
DAY 74 / 210

Introduction to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Phase 2 begins the shift from pretraining-scale work to targeted adaptation; today establishes the core motivation and taxonomy of PEFT methods so later days can implement and benchmark them against full fine-tuning baselines.

45 min target📝 3 quiz Qs

Resources

Deliverable

Journal entry (1-2 paragraphs) comparing full fine-tuning vs. at least two PEFT methods with one concrete example from the learner's current stack

Quiz · 3 questions

1. Which PEFT method freezes the base model and injects trainable low-rank matrices into attention layers?

2. Why does LoRA typically reduce memory footprint more than Adapter layers during training?

3. In the context of a production API serving multiple users, list two deployment advantages of using a PEFT checkpoint versus a fully fine-tuned model.

Journal