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Synopsis
Capable by default. Reliable by design.
If you're a practitioner who has watched a promising AI demo fail to survive contact with production, where prompting hits its ceiling, retrieval isn't enough, and the model still can't be trusted with your domain, post-training is what you've been missing.
Post-Training is a practical guide to turning foundation models into production-ready systems — reshaping behavior, aligning to your values, and deploying with confidence. Each technique is taught concept-first, then implementation-through-code, so you understand not just what to run, but what you're actually changing inside the model.
You'll leave with the skills to:
- Fine-tune models on curated datasets using supervised fine-tuning, LoRA, and QLoRA without destroying the base model's general capabilities
- Apply reinforcement learning from human feedback and modern preference optimization methods, including GRPO, ORPO, and beyond, to shape model behavior
- Evaluate models rigorously: design benchmarks, detect regression, and measure quality claims that survive scrutiny
- Adapt models to specialized domains, from clinical language to legal text, turning general capability into a defensible competitive advantage
- Train agentic models that take sequences of actions reliably, not just models that talk about taking actions
- Quantize and compress fine-tuned models for deployment without sacrificing the gains you trained for
Post-training is where models stop being impressive and start being useful. This book teaches you to do it right.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Chris von Csefalvay is a Principal at HCLTech's AI Practice, where he leads post-training research and clinical intelligence. He has held senior data science leadership roles across major enterprises, published extensively on distributed computing for ML, and designed language models for applications ranging from pharmacovigilance to social dynamics. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Cardiff University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and Senior Member of IEEE.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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The Craft of Post-Training (Paperback)
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No Starch Press,US, San Francisco, 2026
ISBN 10: 1718505205
ISBN 13: 9781718505209
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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Capable by default. Reliable by design.A pre-trained model has read most of the internet-and can be trusted with almost none of it. Post-training is the work that changes that: where you take a raw, general model and shape it into something that behaves, follows instructions, refuses what it shouldn't do, and handles the specific job you need. It's the human hand on the machine, and the part almost no one explains.Chris von Csefalvay has spent his career building production ML systems in industry, from clinical language to legal text. In The Craft of Post-Training, he shows you the decisions behind every technique: when to fine-tune and when not to, why a model quietly gets worse, and which method fits the constraint you're actually under. The math is here, because knowing why a technique works is what lets you debug it when it breaks.You'll know how to:Choose among the main post-training methods, from SFT and RLHF to DPO, KTO, and GRPO, well enough to fix failures instead of guessingAdapt a model to your domain without catastrophic forgetting-the tendency of a network to abruptly overwrite what it already knew when you train it on something newRun larger models with the memory you have by using new quantizationTrain agentic systems to act reliably under adversarial pressureMeasure what matters in your deployment, beyond standard benchmarksWhen you've used LLMs long enough, you start to wonder what was done to make them behave. The secret is in the post-training that shaped them. The Craft of Post-Training shows you how that's done. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781718505209
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The Craft of Post-Training: A Practical Guide for AI Engineers and Developers (Paperback or Softback)
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No Starch Press 9/1/2026, 2026
ISBN 10: 1718505205
ISBN 13: 9781718505209
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The Craft of Post-Training
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Paperback. Condition: New. If you're a practitioner who has watched a promising AI demo fail to survive contact with production, where prompting hits its ceiling, retrieval isn't enough, and the model still can't be trusted with your domain, post-training is what you've been missing. The Craft of Post-Training is a practical guide to turning foundation models into production-ready systems - reshaping behavior, aligning to your values, and deploying with confidence. Each technique is taught concept-first, then implementation-through-code, so you understand not just what to run, but what you're actually changing inside the model. You'll leave with the skills to: Fine-tune models on curated datasets using supervised fine-tuning, LoRA, and QLoRA without destroying the base model's general capabilities; Apply reinforcement learning from human feedback and modern preference optimization methods, including GRPO, ORPO, and beyond, to shape model behavior; Evaluate models rigorously: design benchmarks, detect regression, and measure quality claims that survive scrutiny; Adapt models to specialized domains, from clinical language to legal text, turning general capability into a defensible competitive advantage; Train agentic models that take sequences of actions reliably, not just models that talk about taking actions; Quantize and compress fine-tuned models for deployment without sacrificing the gains you trained for. Post-training is where models stop being impressive and start being useful. This book teaches you to do it right. Seller Inventory # LU-9781718505209
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