Spent a whole weekend trying to get a model to stop giving weird answers

I was fine-tuning a small language model on some customer service chats, about 500 examples. The goal was to make it stop saying 'I apologize for the inconvenience' to every single question, even happy ones. I thought it would take maybe 4 hours. It took me two full days, over 16 hours total, messing with the training data and prompts. On one side, maybe I should have just scrapped my data and started over. On the other, I felt stubborn and wanted to fix what I had. Has anyone else hit a wall with a tiny, specific behavior that just would not train out?

3 comments

3 Comments

grant.anthony28d ago

My model started telling users to "stay hydrated" after every answer, like a weird chatbot mom. I wasted a whole Saturday trying to make it stop being so caring. Sometimes the data just gets a weird idea stuck in its head.

jamies455d ago

My first chatbot project ended every single response with "I hope this helps," even when it was clearly giving wrong information about movie times. I had to go back through thousands of training examples to find where that pattern started. It took me two full weekends of cleaning data before it finally stopped. The model just decides it found a perfect closing line and clings to it forever.

mia_lee28d agoMost Upvoted

My first model kept ending every single reply with "Have a blessed day," even when answering technical support tickets about broken servers. I spent three evenings trying to train that out before I just gave up and deleted the whole data set. Sometimes the model latches onto a phrase like a security blanket and just will not let go.