kitchenbot-chat

LoRA chat adapter for bychwa/kitchenbot-base — the second half of a weekend experiment to learn pretrain → SFT on a niche cooking model.

Base model	bychwa/kitchenbot-base (~6.85M GPT-2, trained from scratch)
Training code	github.com/bychwa/kitchenbot
SFT run	wandb · syrnpr69

Motivation

After pretraining a tiny recipe LM, I wanted it to answer short cooking questions in a chat format — without full fine-tuning. LoRA on a single RTX 3090 was the right tool: small adapter (~1 MB), fast iteration, same pod as pretrain.

What this repo contains

This Hub repo is a PEFT/LoRA adapter, not a full model. Always load it on top of bychwa/kitchenbot-base.

LoRA setting	Value
Rank r	16
lora_alpha	32
Dropout	0.05
Target modules	c_attn, c_proj
Task	Causal LM (SFT via TRL)

Training data

10,000 synthetic Q&A pairs (data/cooking_qa.jsonl) built from idoyaaran/mise-recipes with simple templates, e.g.:

• “What are the ingredients for {title}?”
• “How do I make {title}?”
• “What is the first step for {title}?”

Messages use a small Jinja chat template with <|user|> / <|assistant|> tokens (set on the base tokenizer before SFT).

Hardware (RunPod)

Same pod as the base run:

Spec	Value
GPU	1× NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24 GB)
CUDA	13.0
Python	3.12
Stack	PyTorch 2.5.1+cu121, Transformers 5.14, TRL, PEFT, W&B

Training procedure

Supervised fine-tuning with trl.SFTTrainer + LoRA.

Hyperparameter	Value
Learning rate	2e-4
Batch size	8
Grad accumulation	4
Epochs	2
Max length	256
Precision	fp16

Results (train)

Metric	Value
Steps	626
Train runtime	~152 s
train_loss	≈ 4.32
Last logged step loss	≈ 4.10
Mean token accuracy	≈ 0.44

Train curves only — no formal held-out quiz scoreboard shipped with this release.

Quick start

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from peft import PeftModel

base_id = "bychwa/kitchenbot-base"
adapter_id = "bychwa/kitchenbot-chat"

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(adapter_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    base_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16 if torch.cuda.is_available() else torch.float32,
    device_map="auto" if torch.cuda.is_available() else None,
)
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(model, adapter_id)
model.eval()

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "How do I make garlic butter pasta?"}]
prompt = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = tok(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
if torch.cuda.is_available():
    inputs = {k: v.to(model.device) for k, v in inputs.items()}

out = model.generate(
    **inputs,
    max_new_tokens=120,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.7,
    top_p=0.9,
    pad_token_id=tok.eos_token_id,
)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Or use the CLI from the training repo:

export HF_USER=bychwa
python scripts/07_chat.py

Intended use & limitations

Use: casual home-kitchen Q&A demos, learning how LoRA SFT sits on a custom base, portfolio / teaching.

Limits:

• Still a ~7M model — expect wrong steps, mixed recipes, and confident nonsense
• Answers mirror the synthetic templates; not a chef or nutritionist
• 256-token context
• Not suitable for safety-critical or dietary medical advice

Reproduce

# after base is trained / downloaded into models/kitchenbot-base
python scripts/04_build_qa_dataset.py
python scripts/05_set_chat_template.py
python scripts/06_finetune_chat.py

Full walkthrough: https://github.com/bychwa/kitchenbot

License

Apache-2.0 for this adapter. Base model and dataset terms also apply (bychwa/kitchenbot-base, idoyaaran/mise-recipes).

Citations

@software{vonwerra2020trl,
  title   = {{TRL: Transformers Reinforcement Learning}},
  author  = {von Werra, Leandro and Belkada, Younes and Tunstall, Lewis and Beeching, Edward and Thrush, Tristan and Lambert, Nathan and Huang, Shengyi and Rasul, Kashif and Gallouédec, Quentin},
  license = {Apache-2.0},
  url     = {https://github.com/huggingface/trl},
  year    = {2020}
}