Fine-tuning & model distillation

Your use case. Your model advantage.

Advanced companies turn proven AI use cases into a competitive advantage by making their models better. Prompting and context engineering lay the foundation. Fine-tuning builds deeper expertise in your domain, your tools and the work your customers care about.

Build a model advantage

From industry insight
to a model built for your users.

Prompts and context engineering will only take you so far. For companies with established use cases, post-training develops the model itself: stronger domain judgment, more reliable behavior and expertise that grows with your product.

Training, evaluation & deployment
  • PyTorch
  • Hugging Face
  • NVIDIA
  • MLflow
Agent RFT / The customer experience

Less waiting. More getting it right.

A customer asks about an order. Watch two agents use the same tools and data, and see what changes when one has trained for the job.

THE SHORTEST PATH TO AN ANSWERAutoplay · Illustrative product walkthrough
northline.example / help / order-1042
01

Without fine-tuning

General-purpose tool use

Same task
northline®ORDERS / HELP
Tan Nike sneaker, illustrative order item
YOUR ORDER / #1042

Everyday essentials.

Nike Air Force 1 · Size 9

Shipped
Northline supportOnline
Alex · just now
Checking your order
Write a reply…
Time elapsed
0.0s
Tokens used
0
Model cost
$0.0000
Iterations
0
02

With Agent RFT

Trained for these tools and workflows

Same task
northline®ORDERS / HELP
Tan Nike sneaker, illustrative order item
YOUR ORDER / #1042

Everyday essentials.

Nike Air Force 1 · Size 9

Shipped
Northline supportOnline
Alex · just now
Checking your order
Write a reply…
Time elapsed
0.0s
Tokens used
0
Model cost
$0.0000
Iterations
0
01 / 04A familiar question. The same starting point.
0:00 / 0:27

Illustrative scenario, scripted decision summaries and simulated metrics. Fictional storefront; logos identify the tools and framework shown. Both agents receive the same tools, data and validation. Model cost uses an illustrative $2 per million tokens on both sides, covering inference only; training and tool fees are excluded. Actual gains and prices vary.

The fine-tuning field guide

Different data.
Different ways to learn.

Explore the signal behind each technique. Follow real data formats through the training loop, then choose what fits your use case.

Choose a technique

Choose a tab to explore its training flow.

Supervised fine-tuning

Teach the model what a good response looks like.

Bring
Prompts paired with ideal responses
Learn from
Loss on the target response
Work with
TRL · SFTTrainer, PEFT, Axolotl
Training lab / SFTConceptual walkthrough
Demonstrations
Hugging Face
Trainable policy
Answer-token loss
Gradient update → trainable weights
openai/gsm8k · train · row 0
question

Natalia sold clips to 48 of her friends in April, and then she sold half as many clips in May. How many clips did Natalia sell altogether in April and May?

answer · training target
48 / 2 = 24
48 + 24 = 72
#### 72
Real training question · answer abbreviated ↗
Inside the training step
01

Pair task and answer

Use reviewed responses, structured outputs or successful tool traces. This viewer shows a real GSM8K training example.

Conceptual Python
record = {"prompt": question, "completion": answer}
TRL · SFTTrainer / PEFT / AxolotlRead the library docs ↗
Read the full flow
  1. Pair task and answer. Use reviewed responses, structured outputs or successful tool traces. This viewer shows a real GSM8K training example.
  2. Mask the prompt loss. In this completion-only setup, prompt tokens provide context but do not contribute to the training loss.
  3. Learn from the answer. Teacher forcing supplies the earlier gold answer tokens as context. The model predicts the next answer token, without seeing that target in advance.
  4. Save the new behavior. Backpropagate the answer-token loss, then evaluate a held-out task with the same tools and format used in production.

Design consideration: The quality and coverage of your examples set the ceiling. Hold out whole tasks and customers when evaluating.

Where do LoRA and QLoRA fit? They change which parameters you train and how much memory you need. They can support several of these objectives; they are not a separate source of supervision.

Read the illustrated guide
The benefits of fine-tuning

Better models. Better product experiences.

Build a repeatable improvement loop around the capabilities, response times and economics that matter to your customers.

Specialize, evaluate, improve

From industry insight to a model that performs in your production environment.

Industry data & benchmarks

Use our data partnerships, your product signals and expert review to curate training examples and independent evaluation sets around real user needs.

Domain fine-tuning

Teach your terminology, output formats and domain decisions through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization on suitable models.

Agent RFT

Train and evaluate multi-step workflows with your tool schemas, feedback and task rewards. Improve tool selection, argument accuracy and recovery behavior.

Model distillation

Curate and validate a larger teacher model’s outputs, then train a smaller specialist on those examples. Benchmark how much task quality it retains alongside latency and cost.

A continuous improvement loop

Track task success, tool-call accuracy, tokens and time to completion on held-out tasks. Feed reviewed production examples into the next training cycle.

Deployment around your needs

Serve supported custom models through managed APIs or deploy open-weight models on your cloud or on-premises GPUs, aligned with your data and operating requirements.

From benchmark to production

Build your next model advantage with us.

Define success, curate the data, train a specialist and validate the gains in your application.

Rapid-Impact Intervention

SWAT Team

A high-impact strike team that diagnoses, architects, and ships. We bring the ML engineers, infra, and domain expertise needed to deliver measurable lift within weeks.

  • End-to-end diagnostic and solution delivery
  • Cross-functional team: ML engineers, infra, domain SMEs
  • Measurable KPI improvement with defined timelines
Typical timeline: 4-8 weeksDiscuss this engagement
Applied Research Partnership

The ML Lab

A dedicated research partnership where we co-develop proprietary models alongside your team — from initial hypothesis through production deployment.

  • Joint model development and full knowledge transfer
  • Custom algorithms built on your data and objectives
  • Structured engagement from discovery to production scale
Typical timeline: 3-6 monthsDiscuss this engagement
Risk-Free Experimentation

Simulator

A controlled experimentation environment for validating strategies before they touch production. Test against realistic system dynamics and quantify impact upfront.

  • Realistic simulation with historical data replay
  • A/B scenario testing for system-level decisions
  • Quantified impact forecasting before production rollout
Typical timeline: 2-4 weeksDiscuss this engagement
Experience in domain AI

An evaluation foundation for better models.

Make your model a product advantage.

Bring a use case. We’ll map the data, benchmarks and training path to a stronger model.

Talk about your use case
Fine-tuning, Agent RFT & model distillation | TensorOps