Technical practice
Instruction Fine-Tuning Methodologies
What to coverExplain the difference between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in the context of instruction tuning. Discuss how you select the appropriate dataset composition to ensure model alignment with specific task requirements.
Domain Adaptation Strategies
What to coverDescribe your approach to adapting a pre-trained LLM to a specialized domain, such as legal or medical text. Address the trade-offs between full parameter fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA or QLoRA.
Model Evaluation Metrics
What to coverBeyond standard perplexity, how do you evaluate the performance of an instruction-tuned model? Suggest metrics or frameworks for assessing factual accuracy, hallucination rates, and adherence to specific formatting constraints.
Data Preprocessing for Large Datasets
What to coverDetail your pipeline for cleaning and tokenizing large-scale datasets for LLM training. Explain how you handle data quality issues, such as deduplication, filtering low-quality content, and managing token length constraints.
Performance Tuning and Optimization
What to coverWhen a model fails to meet latency or throughput requirements in production, what diagnostic steps do you take? Discuss techniques like model quantization, pruning, or knowledge distillation to optimize inference performance.
Framework Proficiency: PyTorch vs. TensorFlow
What to coverCompare the advantages of using PyTorch versus TensorFlow for custom LLM training loops. Suggestion: Be prepared to discuss how you manage memory efficiency and distributed training across multiple GPUs in your preferred framework.
Handling Catastrophic Forgetting
What to coverHow do you mitigate catastrophic forgetting when fine-tuning a model on a new domain? Discuss techniques such as replay buffers, elastic weight consolidation, or mixing original training data with new domain-specific data.
Behavioural practice
Mentoring and Technical Leadership
What to coverDescribe a time when you had to mentor a junior team member who was struggling with a complex model development task. Explain the steps you took to guide them while ensuring the project timeline remained on track.
Cross-Functional Decision Making
What to coverProvide an example of a situation where you had to influence a cross-functional team to adopt a specific technical approach for model development. How did you communicate the trade-offs to stakeholders who may not have a deep technical background?
Managing Technical Disagreements
What to coverTell me about a time you disagreed with a team member or stakeholder regarding a model architecture or training strategy. How did you resolve the conflict and what was the final outcome for the project?
Iterative Problem Solving
What to coverDescribe a project where initial model performance was unsatisfactory. Walk me through your iterative process for analyzing the outputs, identifying the root cause, and implementing changes that led to improved performance.