Asked about Running a fine-tune properly
How do you know the fine-tune actually beat the prompt?
An answer that works
Score both on the identical held-out set with the identical grader in the same run, and keep the pairing. Report the disagreement counts rather than just the two accuracies: 78 against 71 means something different when the disagreements are 28 to 14 than when they are 70 to 63, and only the first is a result. A paired test such as McNemar uses only the examples the two systems disagreed on, which is where all the information about the difference is; throwing the pairing away and comparing two accuracies can turn a significant result into an interval that contains zero on the same data.
What gets marked up
Passable answers name a held-out set. Strong ones insist on the same examples for both systems, on the best prompt rather than a weak one as the baseline, and on reading the cases the prompt got right and the fine-tune got wrong before shipping.
Reading an answer is not being able to give one. The section that teaches this is Running a fine-tune properly, 6 hours of Fine-tuning.
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