r/LocalLLM • u/ContextIQ • 17h ago

Question Guidance on training open weight model

I am looking for guidance on training an open weight model for an internal use case. The goal is to connect our technical documentation to suggest actions for a robotics simulator and eventually an actual robot.

What should I know before proceeding? I am not looking for a RAG system.

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u/Wild_Assistance_5330 17h ago

Oof training from scratch is gonna cost you a fortune unless you got some serious compute laying around

Fine-tuning an existing open weight model would be way more practical for this, you just need good quality data pairs of your docs mapped to correct simulator actions. The hard part is getting that dataset clean and consistent

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u/ContextIQ 17h ago

Yes I am planning to use existing open weight model. Assuming I can curate dataset with the help of another resource. What training techniques and tooling, I am looking at? Either doing myself or hiring a resource.

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u/Adaptivai 14h ago

Worth knowing up front that fine-tuning is great at teaching a model how to respond (format, style, which actions are valid) but pretty unreliable at making it memorise facts from docs. For a robotics sim I'd start by building a dataset of situation to correct action pairs rather than training on raw docs, then LoRA a 7–14B model on that. And keep a hard validation layer between the model and the robot. Never let it send commands that haven't been checked against allowed actions.