Live data from Hacker News

Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

unsloth.ai

41–50 of 118 posts

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#41

[flagged]

> where latency matters more than raw accuracy – think industrial inspection

Huh? Why would industrial inspection, in particular, benefit from lower latency in exchange for accuracy? Sounds a bit backwards, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#42
post #6

Fine tuning is a story that is nice to tell but that with modern LLMs makes less and less sense. Modern LLMs are so powerful that they are able to few shot learn complicated things, so a strong prompt and augmenting the generation (given the massive context window of Qwen3.5, too) is usually the best option available. There are models for which fine tuning is great, like image models: there with LoRa you can get good…

where it makes sense IMO is when you need it to know about a large amount of information that's not already in the model, such as a company knowledgebase, code repositories or a trove of specialized legal documents... in that case it's not realistic to try to stuff the context window every time with that information, especially if you're trying to make a responsive chat bot.

indeed, and in practical terms, this is more often than never, and particularly with large knowledge bases. also makes super sense for VLMs and ViT models.

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#44

[flagged]

> where latency matters more than raw accuracy – think industrial inspection Huh? Why would industrial inspection, in particular, benefit from lower latency in exchange for accuracy? Sounds a bit backwards, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

At a very high level, think fruit sorting[0] where the conveyor belt doesn't stop rolling and you need to rapidly respond, and all the way through to monitoring for things like defects in silicon wafers and root causing it. Some of these issues aren't problematic on their own, but you can aggregate data over time to see if a particular machine, material or process within a factory is degrading over time. This might not be throughout the entire factory but isolated to a particular batch of material or a particular subsection within it. This is not a hypothetical example: this is an active use case.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxff_CnvPek

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where latency matters more than raw accuracy – think industrial inspection Huh? Why would industrial inspection, in particular, benefit from lower latency in exchange for accuracy? Sounds a bit backwards, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

At a very high level, think fruit sorting[0] where the conveyor belt doesn't stop rolling and you need to rapidly respond, and all the way through to monitoring for things like defects in silicon wafers and root causing it. Some of these issues aren't problematic on their own, but you can aggregate data over time to see if a particular machine, material or process within a factory is degrading over time. This might n…

But why would I want to results to be done faster but less reliable, vs slower and more reliable? Feels like the sort of thing you'd favor accuracy over speed, otherwise you're just degrading the quality control?

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a very high level, think fruit sorting[0] where the conveyor belt doesn't stop rolling and you need to rapidly respond, and all the way through to monitoring for things like defects in silicon wafers and root causing it. Some of these issues aren't problematic on their own, but you can aggregate data over time to see if a particular machine, material or process within a factory is degrading over time. This might n…

But why would I want to results to be done faster but less reliable, vs slower and more reliable? Feels like the sort of thing you'd favor accuracy over speed, otherwise you're just degrading the quality control?

The high-nines of fruit organization are usually not worth running a 400 billion parameter model to catch the last 3 fruit.

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a very high level, think fruit sorting[0] where the conveyor belt doesn't stop rolling and you need to rapidly respond, and all the way through to monitoring for things like defects in silicon wafers and root causing it. Some of these issues aren't problematic on their own, but you can aggregate data over time to see if a particular machine, material or process within a factory is degrading over time. This might n…

But why would I want to results to be done faster but less reliable, vs slower and more reliable? Feels like the sort of thing you'd favor accuracy over speed, otherwise you're just degrading the quality control?

Local, offline system you control is worth a lot. Introducing an external dependency guarantees you will have downtime outside of your control.

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest case for fine tuning is probably that you can take small models, fine tune them for applications that require structured output, and then run cheap inference at scale. "Frontier LLMs can do it with enough context" is not really a strong argument against fine-tuning, because they're expensive to run.

Especially for super constrained applications. I don't care if the language model that I use for my extremely specific business domain can solve PhD math or remember the works of Shakespeare. I'd trade all of that for pure task specific accuracy.

Can you share more details about your use case? The good applications of fine tuning are usually pretty niche, which tends to make people feel like others might not be interested in hearing the details.

As a result it's really hard to read about real-world use cases online. I think a lot of people would love to hear more details - at least I know I would!

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest case for fine tuning is probably that you can take small models, fine tune them for applications that require structured output, and then run cheap inference at scale. "Frontier LLMs can do it with enough context" is not really a strong argument against fine-tuning, because they're expensive to run.

I agree- I'm currently trying to learn how I can embed a fine tuned tiny model into my c++ game so it can provide a narrative in prose of certain game-event logs. It needs to be as tiny as possible so it doesn't take resources away from the running game.

How small a model are we talking? Don't even the smallest models which would work need gigabytes of memory?

Re: Qwen3.5 Fine-Tuning Guide

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where latency matters more than raw accuracy – think industrial inspection Huh? Why would industrial inspection, in particular, benefit from lower latency in exchange for accuracy? Sounds a bit backwards, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

At a very high level, think fruit sorting[0] where the conveyor belt doesn't stop rolling and you need to rapidly respond, and all the way through to monitoring for things like defects in silicon wafers and root causing it. Some of these issues aren't problematic on their own, but you can aggregate data over time to see if a particular machine, material or process within a factory is degrading over time. This might n…

But that's not something you'd use an LLM for. There have been computer vision systems sorting bad peas for more than a decade[0], of course there are plenty of use cases for very fast inspection systems. But when would you use an LLM for anything like that?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLDxXPziztw

Post reply on HN