Case Study

Optimizing a Transformer for a Niche Task

A practical, step-by-step example of using JAXforge to build and fine-tune a model for a specialized problem: analyzing legal documents.

The Hypothetical Problem

Goal

We need to build a Transformer model capable of Named Entity Recognition (NER) on lengthy legal contracts. The model must identify entities like "Plaintiff," "Defendant," and "Jurisdiction" with high accuracy and process documents efficiently.

Step-by-Step with JAXforge

1. AI-Assisted Scaffolding

We start in the JAX Code Generator. Instead of a generic prompt, we get specific: 'Generate a JAX/FLAX RoBERTa-style encoder block optimized for long sequences.' The AI provides a starting point with Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), which is better suited for long documents than standard positional encodings.

2. Intelligent Hyperparameter Configuration

In the LLM Configurator's AI tab, we describe our task: 'A model for NER in legal texts. Prioritize accuracy and handling sequences up to 4096 tokens.' The AI suggests a higher d_model to capture complex legal jargon and a specific number of attention heads that balances performance and granularity.

3. Manual Fine-Tuning and Justification

The AI's suggestion is a great start. We then switch to the 'Manual' tab to make a final adjustment. We slightly reduce the number of heads, knowing this will increase the head dimension (d_k). This is a deliberate trade-off: a larger head dimension allows the model to capture more complex relationships within a single attention head, which is crucial for dense legal text. We save this final configuration to our workspace.