llm-pipeline

An educational, end-to-end PyTorch toolkit for studying how modern LLM training, inference, quantization, and serving actually work. The goal is one repo where you can read — and run — pure-PyTorch / pure-Python implementations of techniques you'd otherwise piece together from a dozen libraries and papers.

This is a learning project, not a production library. Where the standard tools (transformers, peft, bitsandbytes, llama.cpp) are battle-tested, this repo prioritizes clarity of implementation over feature completeness or peak performance. Every algorithm aims to be readable as a reference, with hooks to compare against the canonical version.

What's in here

• Parameter-efficient fine-tuning — LoRA, DoRA, RSLoRA, multi-adapter routing, adapter merging (TIES, DARE, etc.).
• Training modes — SFT, DPO, GRPO, PPO/RLHF, ORPO, KTO, reward modelling, distillation.
• Optimizers — AdamW (incl. paged 8-bit via bitsandbytes), SGD, RMSprop, and Muon (matmul-only updates with AdamW auto-routed to embeddings, LM head, biases, and norms). Recent optimizers live under training/optimization/optimizers/.
• Inference — paged attention KV cache, continuous batching, speculative decoding (two-model + MTP-driven), and an OpenAI-compatible serving layer.
• Quantization — bitsandbytes / AQLM / LoftQ for training; an educational pure-Python K-quant + I-quant family (Q3_K–Q8_K, IQ4_NL, outlier-aware variants) with Triton GPU kernels for the hot paths; a from-scratch GGUF v3 writer.
• Hand-rolled Qwen3 / Qwen3.5 / Qwen3.6 — pure-PyTorch implementations including Gated DeltaNet linear-attention, hybrid attention layer interleave, MoE with shared expert, MTP head, vision tower.
• Distributed training — DDP, FSDP, tensor parallelism (Qwen3), expert-parallel MoE.
• Model merging — full state-dict TIES / DARE / task-arithmetic / linear.

The Qwen3 family inference paths use hand-rolled implementations; the training, serving, and merging paths work against any HuggingFace causal LM.

Install

Python 3.9–3.13 + CUDA. Dependency management uses uv — a single-binary, drop-in replacement for pip + venv that reads the existing pyproject.toml directly. If you don't have it yet:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh   # or `pip install uv`

Then:

git clone https://github.com/DavidAkinpelu/llm-pipeline.git
cd llm-pipeline
uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[serving,quantization,dev]"

Extras:

• quantization — bitsandbytes, aqlm, scipy, triton (Linux);
• serving — FastAPI, uvicorn, Prometheus, pydantic;
• loggers — wandb, mlflow, tensorboard (each soft-imported; install only the one you use);
• dev — pytest, black, flake8 + Flake8-pyproject, mypy;
• docs — sphinx + theme;
• flash — ninja only. flash-attn itself is torch+CUDA-version-pinned and must be installed manually; the inference engine falls back gracefully when it's missing.

Stock pip still works (python -m venv .venv && pip install -e ".[...]"); uv is just faster and keeps a uv.lock for reproducible installs.

Quick taste

Inference:

import torch
from llm_pipeline.inference import Qwen3InferenceEngine, Qwen3InferenceConfig

engine = Qwen3InferenceEngine(Qwen3InferenceConfig(
    model_path="Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B", device="cuda:0", dtype=torch.float16,
))
prompt = engine.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    [{"role": "user", "content": "Why is the sky blue?"}],
    tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True,
)
print(engine.generate(prompt, max_tokens=64, temperature=0.3))

SFT training (sketch — see examples/ for runnable scripts):

from llm_pipeline.training import Trainer, TrainerConfig, OptimizerConfig

trainer = Trainer(
    model, dataloader,
    config=TrainerConfig(
        output_dir="./checkpoints", max_steps=200, precision="bf16",
        optimizer=OptimizerConfig(name="adamw", lr=5e-5, use_paged=True),
    ),
)
trainer.train()

Swap name="adamw" for name="muon" to use Muon. The same pattern applies to DPO, GRPO, PPO, ORPO, KTO, reward-model, and distillation trainers — each is a Trainer subclass with its own config.

Quantize a model with the educational K-quant family:

from llm_pipeline.quantization import Quantizer, QuantMethod
qm = Quantizer(method=QuantMethod.Q4_K_M).quantize(model)
qm.save("model.llmpq")

OpenAI-compatible server:

python -m llm_pipeline.production.serving.server \
    --model Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B --device cuda:0 --dtype fp16 --port 8000

A reference Dockerfile lives at src/llm_pipeline/production/deployment/Dockerfile.

Project layout

src/llm_pipeline/
├── adapters/        LoRA / DoRA / RSLoRA + multi-adapter
├── core/            wrappers, registry, configs
├── inference/       Qwen3 engine, paged attn, speculative decoding
├── merging/         full-state-dict merging
├── models/          hand-rolled Qwen3 / Qwen3.5 / Qwen3.6 + generic HF loader
├── parallelism/     tensor parallelism, expert parallelism
├── production/      FastAPI server, Prometheus, Dockerfile
├── quantization/    BnB / AQLM / LoftQ + educational K-quants + GGUF writer
├── testing/         pytest suites
├── training/        Trainer, optimizers (incl. Muon), schedulers, training modes
└── utils/

Tests

pytest src/llm_pipeline/testing/             # full suite
pytest src/llm_pipeline/testing/unit/        # unit only (no GPU)

Triton-kernel and CUDA-only tests are auto-skipped when the toolchain is absent.

Documentation

This README is a deliberately thin overview. Full documentation — architecture deep-dives, derivations, and tutorials walking through each implementation — is the next phase of work and will land under docs/.

License

MIT.