AI RESEARCH

[P] Domain specific LoRA fine tuning on consumer hardware

r/MachineLearning

Been experimenting with a pattern for building domain-specific local LLMs that I haven't seen documented cleanly elsewhere. The problem: base models fine for general tasks but struggle with domain-specific structured data - wrong schema assumptions, inconsistent output formatting, hallucinated column names even when the data is passed as context via RAG. The approach: Phase 1 - Use your existing RAG pipeline to generate (question, SQL, data, baseline_answer) examples automatically via a local model. No annotation, no cloud, ~100-200 examples in 20 minutes.