I’m trying to learn more about LLMs, but I haven’t found any explanation for what determines which prompt template format a model requires.

For example meta-llama’s llama-2 requires this format:

…INST and <<SYS>> tags, BOS and EOS tokens…

But if I instead download’s TheBloke’s version of llama-2 the prompt template should instead be:

SYSTEM: …

USER: {prompt}

ASSISTANT:

I thought this would have been determined how the original training data was formatted, but afaik TheBloke only converted the llama-2 models from one format to another. Looking at the documentation for the GGML format I don’t see anything related to the prompt being embedded in the model file.

Anyone who understands this stuff who could point me in the right direction?

  • ffhein@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thanks! I’m going to do some experiments and see if I get different results. I’ve been using TheBloke’s format and it worked mostly well, but perhaps switching to meta-llama’s format will eliminate the occasional bugs I’ve had.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s probably the most reasonable thing you can do.

      I’m not sure how much of a difference we expect from 100% the correct prompt compared to something roughly in that direction. I’ve been tinkering around with instruction style tuned models (from the previous/first llama) and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. I also sometimes used a ‘wrong’ prompt for days and couldn’t tell. Maybe the models are ‘intelligent’ enough to compensate for that. I’m not sure. I usually try to get it right to get all the performance out of it.