LLM Fine-Tuning and RL Tutorial

leslysandra · x · 2026-07-11

This post shares an in-depth guide on how to fine-tune LLMs in 2026. The core idea is that when system prompts, few-shot examples, and temperature adjustments are no longer enough to meet task requirements reliably, it's time to shift to systematic fine-tuning.

The article lists common and advanced techniques, including LoRA, QLoRA, Prefix/Adapter/P-Tuning, Instruction Tuning, BitFit, Soft Prompts, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, Multi-Task Fine-Tuning, and Federated Fine-Tuning. It emphasizes fine-tuning LLMs using RL and mentions using automated, LLM-graded rewards to reduce the manual effort required for reward engineering. The author notes that this entire pipeline is built on 100% open-source tools.

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