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Finetuning for Classification


Creator: Chung-En Johnny Yu

Content updated: 2026-02-20

Source:

Hands-on practice this notebook on your Google Colab:

  1. Click here to open this notebook

  2. Now, run the code and practice it!

Additional resources:

  • To be added.


matplotlib version: 3.10.0
numpy version: 2.0.2
tiktoken version: 0.12.0
torch version: 2.10.0+cu128
tensorflow version: 2.19.0
pandas version: 2.2.2

Categories of finetuning

It’s similar to training a convolutional network to classify handwritten digits. In classification finetuning, we have a specific number of class labels (for example, “spam” and “not spam”) that the model can output. A classification finetuned model can only predict classes it has seen during training (for example, “spam” or “not spam”), whereas an instruction-finetuned model can usually perform many tasks. We can think of a classification-finetuned model as a very specialized model; in practice, it is much easier to create a specialized model than a generalist model that performs well on many different tasks.

The following steps are similar to what we do in machine learning.

Preparing the dataset

We use a dataset consisting of spam and non-spam text messages to finetune the LLM to classify them.

sms_spam_collection/SMSSpamCollection.tsv already exists. Skipping download and extraction.
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The dataset is saved as a tab-separated text file, which we can load into a pandas DataFrame.

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When we check the class distribution, we see that the data contains “ham” (i.e., “not spam”) much more frequently than “spam”.

Label
ham     4825
spam     747
Name: count, dtype: int64

For simplicity, and because we prefer a small dataset for educational purposes anyway (it will make it possible to finetune the LLM faster), we subsample (undersample) the dataset so that it contains 747 instances from each class.

Label
ham     747
spam    747
Name: count, dtype: int64

Next, we change the string class labels “ham” and “spam” into integer class labels 0 and 1:

Loading...

Let’s now define a function that randomly divides the dataset into training, validation, and test subsets.

Creating data loaders

Note that the text messages have different lengths; if we want to combine multiple training examples in a batch, we have to either:

  1. Truncate all messages to the length of the shortest message in the dataset or batch.

  2. Pad all messages to the length of the longest message in the dataset or batch.

We choose option 2 and pad all messages to the longest message in the dataset with <|endoftext|> as a padding token.

[50256]

The SpamDataset class below identifies the longest sequence in the training dataset and adds the padding token to the others to match that sequence length:

120

We also pad the validation and test set to the longest training sequence.

  • Note that validation and test set samples that are longer than the longest training example are being truncated via encoded_text[:self.max_length] in the SpamDataset code.

  • This behavior is entirely optional, and it would also work well if we set max_length=None in both the validation and test set cases.

Next, we use the dataset to instantiate the data loaders.

As a verification step, we iterate through the data loaders and ensure that the batches contain 8 training examples each, where each training example consists of 120 tokens.

Train loader:
Input batch dimensions: torch.Size([8, 120])
Label batch dimensions torch.Size([8])

Lastly, let’s print the total number of batches in each dataset.

130 training batches
19 validation batches
38 test batches

Initializing model with pretrained weights

We initialize the pretrained model we worked with in the previous chapter.

checkpoint: 100%|██████████| 77.0/77.0 [00:00<00:00, 130kiB/s]
encoder.json: 100%|██████████| 1.04M/1.04M [00:00<00:00, 3.03MiB/s]
hparams.json: 100%|██████████| 90.0/90.0 [00:00<00:00, 190kiB/s]
model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001: 100%|██████████| 498M/498M [00:32<00:00, 15.4MiB/s]
model.ckpt.index: 100%|██████████| 5.21k/5.21k [00:00<00:00, 10.2MiB/s]
model.ckpt.meta: 100%|██████████| 471k/471k [00:00<00:00, 1.86MiB/s]
vocab.bpe: 100%|██████████| 456k/456k [00:00<00:00, 1.71MiB/s]

To ensure that the model was loaded correctly, let’s double-check that it generates coherent text.

Every effort moves you forward.

The first step is to understand the importance of your work

Before we finetune the model as a classifier, let’s see if the model can perhaps already classify spam messages via prompting.

Is the following text 'spam'? Answer with 'yes' or 'no': 'You are a winner you have been specially selected to receive $1000 cash or a $2000 award.'

The following text 'spam'? Answer with 'yes' or 'no': 'You are a winner

As we can see, the model is not very good at following instructions. This is expected, since it has only been pretrained and not instruction-finetuned (instruction finetuning will be covered in the next chapter).

Adding classification head

Let’s take a look at the model architecture first.

GPTModel(
  (tok_emb): Embedding(50257, 768)
  (pos_emb): Embedding(1024, 768)
  (drop_emb): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
  (trf_blocks): Sequential(
    (0): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (1): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (2): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (3): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (4): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (5): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (6): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (7): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (8): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (9): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (10): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
    (11): TransformerBlock(
      (att): MultiHeadAttention(
        (W_query): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_key): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (W_value): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (out_proj): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=768, bias=True)
        (dropout): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
      )
      (ff): FeedForward(
        (layers): Sequential(
          (0): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=3072, bias=True)
          (1): GELU()
          (2): Linear(in_features=3072, out_features=768, bias=True)
        )
      )
      (norm1): LayerNorm()
      (norm2): LayerNorm()
      (drop_resid): Dropout(p=0.0, inplace=False)
    )
  )
  (final_norm): LayerNorm()
  (out_head): Linear(in_features=768, out_features=50257, bias=False)
)

The goal is to replace and finetune ONLY the output layer. To achieve this, we first freeze the model, meaning that we make all layers non-trainable.

Then, we replace the output layer (model.out_head), which originally maps the layer inputs to 50,257 dimensions (the size of the vocabulary).

  • Since we finetune the model for binary classification (predicting 2 classes, “spam” and “not spam”), we can replace the output layer as shown below, which will be trainable by default.

  • Note that we use BASE_CONFIG["emb_dim"] (which is equal to 768 in the "gpt2-small (124M)" model) to keep the code below more general.

Technically, it’s sufficient to only train the output layer, but finetuning additional layers can noticeably improve the performance. So, we are also making the last transformer block and the final LayerNorm module connecting the last transformer block to the output layer trainable.

For example, let’s feed it some text input:

Inputs: tensor([[5211,  345,  423,  640]])
Inputs dimensions: torch.Size([1, 4])

What’s different compared to previous chapters is that it now has 2 output dimensions instead of 50,257.

Outputs:
 tensor([[[-1.5854,  0.9904],
         [-3.7235,  7.4548],
         [-2.2661,  6.6049],
         [-3.5983,  3.9902]]])
Outputs dimensions: torch.Size([1, 4, 2])

For each input token, there’s one output vector. Since we fed the model a text sample with 4 input tokens, the output consists of 4 2-dimensional output vectors above.

In previous chapter, we discussed the attention mechanism, which connects each input token to each other input token.

  • We then also introduced the causal attention mask that is used in GPT-like models; this causal mask lets a current token only attend to the current and previous token positions.

  • Based on this causal attention mechanism, the 4th (last) token contains the most information among all tokens because it’s the only token that includes information about all other tokens.

  • Hence, we are particularly interested in this last token, which we will finetune for the spam classification task.

Last output token: tensor([[-3.5983,  3.9902]])

Calculating classification loss and accuracy

Before explaining the loss calculation, let’s have a brief look at how the model outputs are turned into class labels.

Last output token: tensor([[-3.5983,  3.9902]])
  1. We convert the outputs (logits) into probability scores via the softmax function and then

  2. obtain the index position of the largest probability value via the argmax function.

Class label: 1

We can apply this concept to calculate the classification accuracy.

  • To calculate the classification accuracy, we can apply the preceding argmax-based prediction code to all examples in a dataset and calculate the fraction of correct predictions as follows (just like in ML):

Let’s apply the function to calculate the classification accuracies for the different datasets:

Device: cuda
Training accuracy: 46.25%
Validation accuracy: 45.00%
Test accuracy: 48.75%

As we can see, the prediction accuracies are not very good, since we haven’t finetuned the model yet.

Before we can start finetuning (/training), we first have to define the loss function we want to optimize during training.

  • The goal is to maximize the spam classification accuracy of the model; however, classification accuracy is not a differentiable function.

  • Hence, instead, we minimize the cross-entropy loss as a proxy for maximizing the classification accuracy.

Using the calc_closs_loader, we compute the initial training, validation, and test set losses before we start training.

Training loss: 2.453
Validation loss: 2.583
Test loss: 2.322

Finetuning model on supervised data

In this section, we define and use the training function to improve the classification accuracy of the model.

  • The train_classifier_simple function below is practically the same as the train_model_simple function we used for pretraining the model in previous chapter.

  • The only differences are that we now:

    1. Track the number of training examples seen (examples_seen) instead of the number of tokens seen.

    2. Calculate the accuracy after each epoch instead of printing a sample text after each epoch.

The evaluate_model function used in the train_classifier_simple is the same as the one we used in previous chapter.

The training takes a while, depends on your device.

Ep 1 (Step 000000): Train loss 2.153, Val loss 2.392
Ep 1 (Step 000050): Train loss 0.617, Val loss 0.637
Ep 1 (Step 000100): Train loss 0.523, Val loss 0.557
Training accuracy: 70.00% | Validation accuracy: 72.50%
Ep 2 (Step 000150): Train loss 0.561, Val loss 0.489
Ep 2 (Step 000200): Train loss 0.419, Val loss 0.397
Ep 2 (Step 000250): Train loss 0.409, Val loss 0.353
Training accuracy: 82.50% | Validation accuracy: 85.00%
Ep 3 (Step 000300): Train loss 0.333, Val loss 0.320
Ep 3 (Step 000350): Train loss 0.340, Val loss 0.306
Training accuracy: 90.00% | Validation accuracy: 90.00%
Ep 4 (Step 000400): Train loss 0.136, Val loss 0.200
Ep 4 (Step 000450): Train loss 0.153, Val loss 0.132
Ep 4 (Step 000500): Train loss 0.222, Val loss 0.137
Training accuracy: 100.00% | Validation accuracy: 97.50%
Ep 5 (Step 000550): Train loss 0.207, Val loss 0.143
Ep 5 (Step 000600): Train loss 0.083, Val loss 0.074
Training accuracy: 100.00% | Validation accuracy: 97.50%
Training completed in 1.05 minutes.

We use matplotlib to plot the loss function for the training and validation set.

<Figure size 500x300 with 2 Axes>

Above, based on the downward slope, we see that the model learns well.

Similarly, we can plot the accuracy below.

<Figure size 500x300 with 2 Axes>

However, we have to keep in mind that we specified eval_iter=5 in the training function earlier, which means that we only estimated the training and validation set performances.

Training accuracy: 97.21%
Validation accuracy: 97.32%
Test accuracy: 95.67%

However, based on the slightly lower test set performance, we can see that the model overfits the training data to a very small degree, as well as the validation data that has been used for tweaking some of the hyperparameters, such as the learning rate.

This is normal, however, and this gap could potentially be further reduced by increasing the model’s dropout rate (drop_rate) or the weight_decay in the optimizer setting.

Using LLM as spam classifier

Finally, let’s use the finetuned GPT model in action.

  • The classify_review function below implements the data preprocessing steps similar to the SpamDataset we implemented earlier.

  • Then, the function returns the predicted integer class label from the model and returns the corresponding class name.

Let’s try it out on a few examples below.

spam
not spam

Finally, let’s save the model in case we want to reuse the model later without having to train it again.

Then, in a new session, we could load the model as follows:

<All keys matched successfully>