#fine-tuning

9 fine-tuning interview questions, asked at Google, Mistral AI, Cohere and 3 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.

Post-train a 7B model to code better for one enterpriseML designAn enterprise customer wants a 7-billion-parameter model that writes better code for them. Design the post-training pipeline end to end: collecting and cleaning data, supervised…
Last asked Sep 2026
LLM application engineering: RAG, context limits, state and prompt injectionML designQuick conceptual questions for an applied AI engineer, each answered in a couple of minutes from real experience: 1. When would you use retrieval-augmented generation and when…
Last asked Sep 2026
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Reward-model RLHF versus direct preference optimizationML designWalk through a classic RLHF pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, a reward model trained on preference pairs, then policy optimization (PPO) with a KL penalty to the reference model…
Last asked Sep 2026
Rapid-fire questions on LLM internalsML designA fast round of short questions on how LLMs work: transformer and attention internals, training and fine-tuning choices, and how models are run in practice. Each answer should be…
Last asked Jul 2026
LLM foundations: architecture, adaptation and steeringML designA broad conversation on large language models: how the architecture works, the ways to adapt a model to a task (full fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods, prompting), and the…
Last asked Jun 2026
Tokenizer design and KL-regularized fine-tuningML designDiscuss how you would design a tokenizer for a language model and the trade-offs involved. Then explain supervised fine-tuning with a KL penalty that keeps the model close to its…
Last asked Jun 2026
LLM fine-tuning and generative modelsML designExplain how large language models are fine-tuned: supervised fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA, and preference tuning, with the trade-offs of each. Then…
Last asked Feb 2026
Improve an LLM's reasoning on a domain taskML designA model reasons poorly on one specialized task. How would you improve it? Compare the options, from prompting and retrieval to fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, say what…
Last asked Dec 2025
Design a multi-tenant fine-tuning and LoRA serving platformAI system designA model provider lets customers fine-tune its open-weight models on their own data through an API, then call the fine-tuned models through the same chat endpoint. Most use LoRA…