trl_md_files/clis.mdx

# Command Line Interfaces (CLIs)

You can use TRL to fine-tune your Language Model with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Direct Policy Optimization (DPO) or even chat with your model using the TRL CLIs.

Currently supported CLIs are:

- `trl sft`: fine-tune a LLM on a text/instruction dataset
- `trl dpo`: fine-tune a LLM with DPO on a preference dataset 
- `trl chat`: quickly spin up a LLM fine-tuned for chatting

## Fine-tuning with the CLI

Before getting started, pick up a Language Model from Hugging Face Hub. Supported models can be found with the filter "text-generation" within models. Also make sure to pick up a relevant dataset for your task.

Before using the `sft` or `dpo` commands make sure to run:
```bash
accelerate config
```
and pick up the right configuration for your training setup (single / multi-GPU, DeepSpeed, etc.). Make sure to complete all steps of `accelerate config` before running any CLI command.

We also recommend you passing a YAML config file to configure your training protocol. Below is a simple example of a YAML file that you can use for training your models with `trl sft` command.

```yaml
model_name_or_path:
  trl-internal-testing/tiny-random-LlamaForCausalLM
dataset_name:
  imdb
dataset_text_field:
  text
report_to:
  none
learning_rate:
  0.0001
lr_scheduler_type:
  cosine
```

Save that config in a `.yaml` and get started immediately! An example CLI config is available as `examples/cli_configs/example_config.yaml`. Note you can overwrite the arguments from the config file by explicitly passing them to the CLI, e.g. from the root folder:

```bash
trl sft --config examples/cli_configs/example_config.yaml --output_dir test-trl-cli --lr_scheduler_type cosine_with_restarts
```

Will force-use `cosine_with_restarts` for `lr_scheduler_type`.

### Supported Arguments 

We do support all arguments from `transformers.TrainingArguments`, for loading your model, we support all arguments from `~trl.ModelConfig`:

[[autodoc]] ModelConfig

You can pass any of these arguments either to the CLI or the YAML file.

### Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT)

Follow the basic instructions above and run `trl sft --output_dir <output_dir> <*args>`: 

```bash
trl sft --model_name_or_path facebook/opt-125m --dataset_name imdb --output_dir opt-sft-imdb
```

The SFT CLI is based on the `examples/scripts/sft.py` script.

### Direct Policy Optimization (DPO)

To use the DPO CLI, you need to have a dataset in the TRL format such as 

* TRL's Anthropic HH dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trl-internal-testing/hh-rlhf-helpful-base-trl-style
* TRL's OpenAI TL;DR summarization dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trl-internal-testing/tldr-preference-trl-style

These datasets always have at least three columns `prompt, chosen, rejected`:

* `prompt` is a list of strings.
* `chosen` is the chosen response in [chat format](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating)
* `rejected` is the rejected response [chat format](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/chat_templating) 


To do a quick start, you can run the following command:

```bash
trl dpo --model_name_or_path facebook/opt-125m --output_dir trl-hh-rlhf --dataset_name trl-internal-testing/hh-rlhf-helpful-base-trl-style
```


The DPO CLI is based on the `examples/scripts/dpo.py` script.


#### Custom preference dataset

Format the dataset into TRL format (you can adapt the `examples/datasets/anthropic_hh.py`):

```bash
python examples/datasets/anthropic_hh.py --push_to_hub --hf_entity your-hf-org
```

## Chat interface

The chat CLI lets you quickly load the model and talk to it. Simply run the following:

```bash
trl chat --model_name_or_path  Qwen/Qwen1.5-0.5B-Chat 
```

> [!TIP]
> To use the chat CLI with the developer installation, you must run `make dev` 
>

Note that the chat interface relies on the tokenizer's [chat template](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/chat_templating) to format the inputs for the model. Make sure your tokenizer has a chat template defined.

Besides talking to the model there are a few commands you can use:

- **clear**: clears the current conversation and start a new one
- **example {NAME}**: load example named `{NAME}` from the config and use it as the user input
- **set {SETTING_NAME}={SETTING_VALUE};**: change the system prompt or generation settings (multiple settings are separated by a ';').
- **reset**: same as clear but also resets the generation configs to defaults if they have been changed by **set**
- **save {SAVE_NAME} (optional)**: save the current chat and settings to file by default to `./chat_history/{MODEL_NAME}/chat_{DATETIME}.yaml` or `{SAVE_NAME}` if provided
- **exit**: closes the interface

The default examples are defined in `examples/scripts/config/default_chat_config.yaml` but you can pass your own with `--config CONFIG_FILE` where you can also specify the default generation parameters.