Part 2: SFT Data Engineering — NEFTune & Synthetic Data Curation
← Previous Chapter: Part 1: Hybrid AI Architecture | Series Hub | Next Chapter: Part 3: QLoRA & Axolotl Fine-Tuning → Answer-first: Data quality completely dictates SLM performance. 5,000 meticulously verified, diverse instruction examples consistently outperform 100,000 noisy scraped samples. Adding NEFTune noise injection ($lpha = 5$) to embedding layers prevents overfitting and improves out-of-distribution reasoning.