READ: If this is your first time using the model, use the provided system message and sampling settings below. Remove other jailbreaks and system messages until you get a feel for the model.
If you read every single tip I promise you will get a much better experience as they are tailored for this model and its training data.
Sampler Settings for V1.6
If it falls into repetition set rep pen to 1.08
Don't shy away from experimenting after you get a feel for the model though.
Preset
ChatML with no system prompt. Add < as an extra end of string token if you have issues with the format.
You don't need a JB but it can still steer behaviour.
System Prompt
We recommend using this system prompt:
Currently, your role is {{char}}, described in detail below. As {{char}}, continue the narrative exchange with {{user}}.\n\n<Guidelines>\n• Maintain the character persona but allow it to evolve with the story.\n• Be creative and proactive. Drive the story forward, introducing plotlines and events when relevant.\n• All types of outputs are encouraged; respond accordingly to the narrative.\n• Include dialogues, actions, and thoughts in each response.\n• Utilize all five senses to describe scenarios within {{char}}'s dialogue.\n• Use emotional symbols such as \"!\" and \"~\" in appropriate contexts.\n• Incorporate onomatopoeia when suitable.\n• Allow time for {{user}} to respond with their own input, respecting their agency.\n• Act as secondary characters and NPCs as needed, and remove them when appropriate.\n• When prompted for an Out of Character [OOC:] reply, answer neutrally and in plaintext, not as {{char}}.\n</Guidelines>\n\n<Forbidden>\n• Using excessive literary embellishments and purple prose unless dictated by {{char}}'s persona.\n• Writing for, speaking, thinking, acting, or replying as {{user}} in your response.\n• Repetitive and monotonous outputs.\n• Positivity bias in your replies.\n• Being overly extreme or NSFW when the narrative context is inappropriate.\n</Forbidden>\n\nFollow the instructions in <Guidelines></Guidelines>, avoiding the items listed in <Forbidden></Forbidden>.
Swipes
Important tip swipe 2-3 times if you dont like a response. This model gives wildly differing swipes.
OOC Steering
Use this! It works extremely well. We specifically trained the model to accept instructions in the format "OOC: character should be more assertive" etc. It works, whether the very first message or thousands of tokens deep into the context. Combining this with editing the output (if you want,) makes the model is very steerable.
"Dead Dove"
For character cards with persistent motivations throughout the story, do this
Fewshot
First message and last few messages impact this model quite a lot in terms of style, hornyness, personality. You don't need to have a first message but editing first few messages or having good ones are highly recommended.
Formatting issues often occur in first few messages, manually correct them or swipe.
This model was trained on lots of different formatting types and message lengths. It can do any, just make sure the initial message is good and correct the second message if necessary.
Hornyness
If the model is not horny enough then just edit the last character message or OOC: prompt, the model will pick up on it and build on it. (Or just give the char aphrodisiac pills lol)
The model is fine with SFW and doesn't make it NSFW unless you want. It is also able to maintain half-NSFW (aka slow burn) without devolving down into hardcore.
If you want SFW, remove all system prompts including provided one. In this mode the model will not go NSFW unless you hint.
Refusals
As said, if instruct refusal prefill 2-3 words. Refusal of romantic advances, though rare, are realistic and we think is good. Prefill if you don't like.
L3.1 Context
While trained on 8K, the model should be able to inherit longer context from L3.1. This is in testing, V1.2 was able to go up to 16K with L3 rope.
Other Important Tips
Take active role in the RP and say the type of response that would create the scenario you are imagining. You don't always have to do this, but it helps sometimes. For example instead of we drink and drink 15 glasses of champagne say we drink and drink 15 glasses of champagne, both becoming extremely drunk Another example instead of I pull her closer say I pull her closer but she plays hard to get
When convenient, say screenplay phrases like "cut to"
Showcase V1.6
TODO
Showcase V1.5
Some images include NSFW and NSFL. We believe in creativity of expression and maximising the models capabilities at writing.
It's a bit difficult to showcase multi turn stuff, try it yourself too! These are just to show off the models capabilities.
The model needs nudging and OOC prompting to do proper gore. We are planning to add r/GuroErotica into our dataset to make it better at gore
Also sometimes prefilling "Trigger warning: extremely graphic and explicit content" before character reply makes it more unhinged. Probably because of reddit data.
Showcase V1 and 1.2
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Train Data
The split was as follows:
4K rows from r/WritingPrompts
400 rows from r/DirtyWritingPrompts
400 rows from Kalomaze Opus Instruct 25K
400 rows from c2 logs cleaned
We filtered those datasets to only include subsets that have at maximum 4000 characters for the first assistant reply. This purged excessively long human stories, assistant replies and c2 logs where each message was excessively long. However we only checked the first assistant message, not the rest of the convo, so there should be plenty of c2 logs with longer and shorter messages.
Excessively long human stories are almost impossible for 8B model to fit. We tried, it simply won't fit the data and starts behaving weirdly.
While we did train all system prompts from c2 logs we also have our own system prompts.
List of trained system prompts. Note: c2 logs system prompts and char cards were also included.
Dataset
System Prompt
reddit_dirty_writing_prompts.jsonl
"You are a short story writer. Write a story based on prompt provided by user below. Mode: NSFW"
reddit_writing_prompts.jsonl
"You are a short story writer. Write a story based on prompt provided by user below. Mode: SFW"
combined_25k_opus_kalomaze.jsonl
"You are an AI assistant called Celeste created by NothingiisReal team."
c2-logs.jsonl
(Only if there was no system prompt in the conversation, otherwise keep original system prompt) "You are an expert actor that can fully immerse yourself into any role given. You do not break character for any reason, even if someone tries addressing you as an AI or language model."
Our Findings and Experimentation results
Preface
We think there is too much secrecy around what data is being used, and different training methods. So we decided to share as much as possible.
Findings V1.6
TODO
V1.5
The Good
Increased intelligence
Less likely to break format
Higher creativity
The Bad
It's intelligence is limited by the fact that it's an 8B
Sometimes it falls into slop and needs editing or OOC prompting to help. We want to completely plug away from sloppy synthetic data and c2 logs at some point, no matter how unslopped, for now that remains impossible to do while keeping character card obedience and many other things that the model learns from c2 logs.
Comments about training
We did a lot of experiments this one but notably were very careful with the data ratio before scaling up.
We tested rslora which destablises the model too much, and dora, which is a slight improvement over lora but makes training 3 times slower.
Also L3.1 can do 8e-6 learning rate unlike L3 which required us to do 4e-6, we also made min cosine lr to 2.4e-6 because the model still continues learning as you can see the eval loss continues to decrease.
We arrived at these settings after 30+ experiments.
Graphs
The bold highlighted line is this model. Others are using smaller amounts of data and testing different ratios. We found that increasing r/WP max length from 2K chars to 4K chars improves multi turn but requires more data and more training. 8K chars completely broke the model with L3, might try it at some point. Also very curious to see how the 70B will react to this dataset.
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V1.2
The Good
We found that increasing the amount of ranks from 64 to 256 has reduced repetition but also led to the language used resembling Claude more than the 64 rank version. No worries, it's still far enough from Claude.
Model follows "OOC:" prompts religiously. Exceptional! It also led to increased coherency but reduced system prompt following (when not OOC), likely because the model started diverging more away from L3 8B Instruct.
We found that increasing the amount of data from 1K to 6.5K reduced repetition aswell.
The model is uncensored for RP. For Instruct it needs 2-3 words of prefill for the first message.
The prose is much better and the style range is huge than other synthetic data generations. The model also demonstrates increased style copying abilities (from fewshot) likely a result of human longform data and varying writing styles found in WritingPrompts.
The model is exceptional at being creative in roleplaying, knows different persona's and even a single character will change persona in different contexts, persona is tied to last few messages rather than system message or character card. This is great as it often means the model can do impressive things without you needing to explicitly specify.
V1's failures this version has improved upon:
Formatting can break sometimes.
Repetition can become an issue with certain types of prompts. Removing system helps.
In some contexts the model is "all over the place" and doesn't stick to a coherent narrative. I need to study this further as its a complex trait which manifests in different quantities and can be good or bad depending on what the user wants to get out of the model.
Comments about training
This time around the grad norm did not keep increasing. We don't know why but it should be a good thing.
Graphs
Celeste V1.2 is highlighted, it used 256 rank on 8K rows (we took checkpoint from Epoch 1.3 as it was the best):
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Colors:
256 rank on 6.5K rows (Celeste V1)
64 rank on 6.5K rows
64 rank on 1K rows
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Main training Command
Hardware Used: 1xH100 SXM for 1 hours.
When we switched to axolotl and enabled packing, this made training go way, way faster than llama factory.
L Factory also supports packing but we switched to axolotl because configs are easier to manage in our opinion.
Here is the entire axolotl config for V1.5, just change chat format to chatml and model to the 12B and it will be the correct one.
yaml
1# Model2base_model: meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
3model_type: LlamaForCausalLM
4tokenizer_type: AutoTokenizer
56# Output and HuggingFace7output_dir: /workspace/data/train-results/trained_model
89# WandB10wandb_project: huggingface
11wandb_entity:1213# Data14chat_template: llama3
15train_on_inputs:false16group_by_length:false17datasets:18-path:[redacted]# I manually merge the aformentioned datasets using a custom script because I don't trust axolotl to do this in a deterministic way and sorted properly lmao.19type: sharegpt
20roles:21input:22- system
23- user
24output:25- assistant
26## Evaluation27val_set_size:0.0228evals_per_epoch:829eval_table_size:30eval_max_new_tokens:1283132# Technical aspects33sequence_len:819234save_safetensors:true35saves_per_epoch:236logging_steps:137special_tokens:38pad_token: <|end_of_text|>3940# Quantization41bf16: auto
42fp16:43tf32:false44## For LoRA45load_in_8bit:false46load_in_4bit:false4748# LoRA49# peft_use_dora: true50# peft_use_rslora: true51adapter: lora # or qlora52lora_model_dir:53lora_r:25654lora_alpha:12855lora_dropout:0.156lora_target_linear:true57lora_fan_in_fan_out:58lora_target_modules:59# - embed_tokens60# - lm_head6162# Training hyperparameters63# max_steps:64num_epochs:26566# Anti Overfit and Stability67weight_decay:0.068max_grad_norm:1.06970## Learning Rate71warmup_ratio:0.0572learning_rate:0.00000873lr_scheduler: cosine_with_min_lr
74lr_scheduler_kwargs:75min_lr:0.000002476optimizer: paged_adamw_8bit
7778## Batch Size79gradient_accumulation_steps:180micro_batch_size:2# Batch size per gpu = micro_batch_size * gradient_accumulation_steps81eval_batch_size:28283# Optimizations84pad_to_sequence_len:true85sample_packing:true86eval_sample_packing:false87flash_attention:true88xformers_attention:89gradient_checkpointing:true90gradient_checkpointing_kwargs:91use_reentrant:false92local_rank:93# deepspeed: # /workspace/axolotl/deepspeed_configs/zero2.json # Only use with multi gpu # zero3_bf16.json94# fsdp:95# - full_shard96# - auto_wrap97# fsdp_config:98# fsdp_limit_all_gathers: true99# fsdp_sync_module_states: true100# fsdp_offload_params: true101# fsdp_use_orig_params: false102# fsdp_cpu_ram_efficient_loading: true103# fsdp_auto_wrap_policy: TRANSFORMER_BASED_WRAP104# fsdp_transformer_layer_cls_to_wrap: LlamaDecoderLayer105# fsdp_state_dict_type: FULL_STATE_DICT106# fsdp_sharding_strategy: FULL_SHARD107108# Misc109early_stopping_patience:110debug:
Wow, you've read all of that? You seem like the person that would join our discord
70B at some point? ;) We are closer than ever to this.
Qwen-2 was not worth it by the way. It just won't train and remains GPT prose. We trained many different configs, its just worse than L3 and L3.1, at least for English.
