/nemo-automodel-recipe-development

name: nemo-automodel-recipe-development
description: Create and modify NeMo AutoModel training and evaluation recipes, including YAML structure, builders, and execution flow.
when_to_use: Creating or modifying training, SFT, or eval recipes, adding new YAML config fields, debugging recipe construction or trainer issues, or understanding the recipe execution flow.
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  author: NVIDIA
  tags:
    - nemo-automodel
    - recipe-development

NeMo AutoModel Recipe Development

<!-- NVSkills signature refresh requested for AM-519. -->

Instructions

For recipe questions, answer with the smallest complete path to action:

1. Name the relevant recipe file or YAML section. 2. List the builder functions or config keys involved. 3. Include a minimal YAML or command example when the question asks how to configure something. 4. End with a local validation command or tiny CPU-compatible test.

For conceptual recipe questions, answer from this skill without inspecting the repository or loading other AutoModel skills unless the user asks you to edit files. Keep the response focused on recipe YAML, builders, CLI routing, tests, and local validation.

Use these compact answer patterns for common questions:

• New finetuning recipe variant: start from the closest file under

`nemo_automodel/recipes/`, update the model, dataset or dataloader, optimizer, loss, LR scheduler, step scheduler, and checkpoint builders, register a CLI route only if adding a command or domain alias, add example YAML under `examples/`, then add a tiny CPU-compatible unit test and run `automodel finetune llm -c <config.yaml>`.

• `_target_` fields: describe `_target_` as the fully qualified Python callable,

explain that sibling keys become keyword arguments, show optimizer and dataset examples, and mention nested CLI overrides such as `--optimizer.lr`.

• Validation and checkpointing: name `step_scheduler.val_check_interval`,

`step_scheduler.checkpoint_interval`, `validation_dataset`, `restore_from.path`, and consolidated safetensors; include the minimal YAML snippet from this skill.

For validation and checkpointing, always name:

• `step_scheduler.val_check_interval` for validation cadence.
• `step_scheduler.checkpoint_interval` for save cadence.
• `validation_dataset` as the validation dataloader source.
• `restore_from.path` for resume.
• Consolidated safetensors as the default checkpoint format for HF ecosystem

compatibility.

Routing Boundary

Use this skill for recipe construction and execution-flow questions: YAML structure, `_target_` callables, builder functions, validation datasets, checkpoint configuration, CLI route registration, and recipe-specific tests.

Do not use this skill for standalone distributed strategy selection, cluster launcher configuration, or model architecture onboarding unless the user is asking how those choices appear inside an AutoModel recipe YAML.

Recipe Architecture

Execution Flow

CLI (automodel finetune llm -c config.yaml)
  -> app.py parses command + domain + config
    -> recipe script (e.g. train_ft.py) main(config_path)
      -> Recipe class .setup() builds all components
        -> .run_train_validation_loop() executes training

Recipe Class

Recipes inherit from `BaseRecipe` and implement two methods:

• `setup()` -- builds model, optimizer, dataloader, loss, LR scheduler, step scheduler, and checkpoint config via builder functions.
• `run_train_validation_loop()` -- executes the training and validation loop.

Builder Pattern

All components are constructed through dedicated builder functions:

• `build_model()` -- instantiates the model from config
• `build_optimizer()` -- creates optimizer (AdamW, etc.)
• `build_dataloader()` -- sets up train and validation dataloaders
• `build_loss_module()` -- creates the loss function
• `build_lr_scheduler()` -- creates the learning rate scheduler
• `build_step_scheduler()` -- creates the step scheduler controlling training progression
• `CheckpointingConfig` -- configures checkpointing (built directly from the YAML `checkpoint:` block via `RecipeConfig.checkpoint`)

Infrastructure Application Order

Components are applied in this strict order after building:

1. PEFT (LoRA, etc.) 2. FP8 quantization 3. QAT (quantization-aware training) 4. Checkpoint load / restore 5. Parameter freezing 6. Sharding (FSDP2, Megatron-FSDP, DDP) 7. Device placement 8. `torch.compile` 9. Context parallelism hooks

YAML Config Anatomy

A complete recipe config follows this structure:

step_scheduler:
  max_steps: 1000
  num_epochs: 1
  grad_accumulation_steps: 4
  val_check_interval: 100
  checkpoint_interval: 500
  log_interval: 10

dist_env:
  master_addr: localhost
  master_port: 29500

rng:
  seed: 42

model:
  _target_: nemo_automodel.models.llm.NemotronHForCausalLM
  name_or_path: meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B
  # additional model kwargs passed to the constructor

compile:
  enabled: false
  backend: inductor

clip_grad_norm:
  max_norm: 1.0

distributed:
  strategy: fsdp2       # fsdp2 | megatron_fsdp | ddp
  dp_size: auto
  tp_size: 1
  cp_size: 1

loss_fn:
  _target_: torch.nn.CrossEntropyLoss

dataset:
  _target_: nemo_automodel.datasets.squad.SquadDataset
  tokenizer_name_or_path: meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B
  max_seq_length: 2048

validation_dataset:
  _target_: nemo_automodel.datasets.squad.SquadDataset
  split: validation

packed_sequence:
  enabled: false

dataloader:
  batch_size: 4
  num_workers: 4
  pin_memory: true

optimizer:
  _target_: torch.optim.AdamW
  lr: 2.0e-5
  weight_decay: 0.01

lr_scheduler:
  _target_: nemo_automodel.schedulers.CosineAnnealingWarmup
  warmup_steps: 50
  min_lr: 1.0e-6

The `_target_` Pattern

The `_target_` key specifies a fully qualified Python callable. All remaining keys in that section are passed as keyword arguments:

optimizer:
  _target_: torch.optim.AdamW   # callable
  lr: 2.0e-5                    # kwarg