Training Albatross An Expert Finance LLM: Leo Pekelis
Feb 13, 2025 · 16:20
Leo Pekelis, chief scientist at Gradient, explains how they transformed an open-source model into Albatross, a finance LLM that tops leaderboards on both general and domain-specific tasks. The key was an automated data pipeline using membership inference to curate finance data from a massive corpus, followed by continual pre-training and alignment via supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization. He also details a one-million-token context extension on a Llama 3-based model that achieves 100% needle-in-the-haystack scores, enabling in-context learning with thousands of examples to reduce hallucinations. The models, v-alpha-tross and the extended-context Llama 3, are open-sourced on Hugging Face.
