Model Card for Phi-2_DPO_M3_Base

A LoRA-finetuned variant of microsoft/phi-2 targeting STEM multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). The model was first trained with SFT on mixed STEM MCQA datasets, then aligned via DPO using human preference data (EPFL exam MCQAs). This Base checkpoint is the standard (non-quantized) version intended for highest fidelity before any 4/8-bit compression.

Model Details

Model Description

This model adapts Phi-2 (≈2.78B params, 2,048 context length) for MCQA, especially STEM. Training used LoRA adapters (rank=16, α=16, dropout=0.05) with the TRL library for SFT and DPO; checkpoints focus on adapter weights for compactness. This Base release loads in full precision (fp16/bf16 capable) and is recommended for evaluation and further finetuning.

• Developed by: ShAIkespear team
• Shared by: ShAIkespear team
• Model type: Causal decoder-only LM (Phi-2) with LoRA adapters; DPO-aligned MCQA assistant
• Language(s) (NLP): English (training/eval datasets primarily EN)
• License: MIT (per repository)
• Finetuned from model: microsoft/phi-2

Model Sources

• Repository: 2.8B-Phi-2-LLM-QA
• Report: “ShAIkerspear – How to replace TAs: A comprehensive study on letting LLMs answer your questions”

Uses

Direct Use

• MCQA answering for STEM and general knowledge benchmarks (e.g., MMLU, OpenBookQA).
• Educational assistants/tutors for multiple-choice reasoning with short explanation-then-answer prompts.

Out-of-Scope Use

• High-stakes domains (medical, legal, safety-critical) without human oversight.
• Generative tasks outside MCQA chat format may underperform (e.g., long-form proofs).
• Any use that violates exam integrity or leaks copyrighted/confidential test content.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

• STEM difficulty: Performance on harder math/science MCQA can hover near chance on some sets, indicating limited reliability for difficult reasoning.
• Alignment drift: DPO after SFT can affect strict letter-only answer formatting; the model may add extra content or follow-ups.
• Data risk: Exam-derived prompts/answers may raise confidentiality/fairness concerns if reused exams are included.

Recommendations

• Keep a human in the loop for grading/teaching.
• Prefer balanced MCQA data; use explicit “### Question / ### Explanation / ### Answer” formatting to stabilize outputs.
• Add guardrails to discourage cheating or policy-violating requests.

How to Get Started with the Model

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_id = "ShAIkespear/Phi-2_DPO_M3_Base"  # replace with your Hub ID

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, use_fast=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, device_map="auto")

prompt = "### Question: What is 2+2?\n### Explanation: Add the integers.\n### Answer:"
inputs = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=10)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Training Details

Training Data

Mixed SFT on MathQA, OpenBookQA, ScienceQA, TAL-SCQ5K, plus balanced/shuffled merged MCQA sets; DPO on HelpSteer and a student-curated EPFL preference dataset (~20–30k pairs; subsets used for SFT/DPO). Long items (>512 tokens) dropped; large datasets clipped to 20k samples. Example split: train 50%, test_overfit 25%, test_comparison 10%, test_quantization 15% (quant split retained for comparability, though this is the Base model).

Training Procedure

Preprocessing

Unified MCQA schema. SFT format: id, subject, question, answer/answer_text, choices. DPO format: prompt, rejected, chosen. Prompts used a structured header: ### Question ... ### Explanation ... ### Answer

Training Hyperparameters

• Regime: Mixed precision typical for TRL (fp16/bf16 depending on hardware); LoRA rank 16, α 16, dropout 0.05.
• Batch sizes: SFT train/eval = 4; DPO = 1 (to avoid OOM).
• Learning rate: 1e-5 for public datasets; 1e-4 for EPFL data; cosine schedule with warmup.
• Frameworks: Hugging Face TRL + PEFT/LoRA, Transformers.

Evaluation

Testing Data, Factors & Metrics

Testing Data

Per-dataset held-out test sets (per splits), plus MMLU converted to the SFT schema.

Factors

Task domain (math vs. general science vs. open-domain), data balancing, and SFT→DPO ordering.

Metrics

MCQA accuracy; DPO pairwise preference accuracy.

Results

Across ablations, the balanced-then-DPO configuration (M3) performed best overall on the team’s benchmark suite. The Base model serves as the reference for subsequent quantized variants.

Summary

• Balanced MCQA SFT improved robustness.
• DPO on EPFL preferences improved alignment and EPFL-style accuracy.
• Use this Base checkpoint when you prioritize maximum fidelity or plan additional finetuning; switch to quantized variants for memory-constrained inference.

Technical Specifications

Model Architecture and Objective

Phi-2 transformer decoder LM (≈2.78B params) with next-token prediction objective; LoRA adapters for parameter-efficient finetuning; DPO for preference alignment.

Software

Hugging Face TRL, PEFT/LoRA, Transformers.

Glossary

• MCQA: Multiple-choice question answering.
• SFT: Supervised finetuning with gold answers.
• DPO: Direct Preference Optimization (pairwise preference alignment).
• LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation for parameter-efficient finetuning.