Right this moment, we’re excited to announce two main enhancements to mannequin fine-tuning in Azure AI Foundry—Reinforcement High quality-Tuning (RFT) with o4-mini, coming quickly, and Supervised High quality-Tuning (SFT) for the 4.1-nano mannequin, obtainable now.
Right this moment, we’re excited to announce three main enhancements to mannequin fine-tuning in Azure AI Foundry—Reinforcement High quality-Tuning (RFT) with o4-mini (coming quickly), Supervised High quality-Tuning (SFT) for the GPT-4.1-nano and Llama 4 Scout mannequin (obtainable now). These updates mirror our continued dedication to empowering organizations with instruments to construct extremely personalized, domain-adapted AI techniques for real-world affect.
With these new fashions, we’re unblocking two main avenues of LLM customization: GPT-4.1-nano is a robust small mannequin, ideally suited for distillation, whereas o4-mini is the primary reasoning mannequin you possibly can fine-tune, and Llama 4 Scout is a best-in-class open supply mannequin.
Reinforcement High quality-Tuning with o4-mini
Reinforcement High quality-Tuning introduces a brand new stage of management for aligning mannequin conduct with complicated enterprise logic. By rewarding correct reasoning and penalizing undesirable outputs, RFT improves mannequin decision-making in dynamic or high-stakes environments.
Coming quickly for the o4-mini mannequin, RFT unlocks new potentialities to be used instances requiring adaptive reasoning, contextual consciousness, and domain-specific logic—all whereas sustaining quick inference efficiency.
Actual world affect: DraftWise
DraftWise, a authorized tech startup, used reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) in Azure AI Foundry Fashions to reinforce the efficiency of reasoning fashions tailor-made for contract technology and evaluate. Confronted with the problem of delivering extremely contextual, legally sound options to legal professionals, DraftWise fine-tuned Azure OpenAI fashions utilizing proprietary authorized knowledge to enhance response accuracy and adapt to nuanced consumer prompts. This led to a 30% enchancment in search consequence high quality, enabling legal professionals to draft contracts sooner and give attention to high-value advisory work.
Reinforcement fine-tuning on reasoning fashions is a possible recreation changer for us. It’s serving to our fashions perceive the nuance of authorized language and reply extra intelligently to complicated drafting directions, which guarantees to make our product considerably extra helpful to legal professionals in actual time.
—James Ding, founder and CEO of DraftWise.
When must you use Reinforcement High quality-Tuning?
Reinforcement High quality-Tuning is greatest suited to use instances the place adaptability, iterative studying, and domain-specific conduct are important. You must think about RFT in case your state of affairs entails:
- Customized Rule Implementation: RFT thrives in environments the place determination logic is very particular to your group and can’t be simply captured by way of static prompts or conventional coaching knowledge. It permits fashions to study versatile, evolving guidelines that mirror real-world complexity.
- Area-Particular Operational Requirements: Best for situations the place inside procedures diverge from business norms—and the place success relies on adhering to these bespoke requirements. RFT can successfully encode procedural variations, similar to prolonged timelines or modified compliance thresholds, into the mannequin’s conduct.
- Excessive Choice-Making Complexity: RFT excels in domains with layered logic and variable-rich determination timber. When outcomes depend upon navigating quite a few subcases or dynamically weighing a number of inputs, RFT helps fashions generalize throughout complexity and ship extra constant, correct choices.
Instance: Wealth advisory at Contoso Wellness
To showcase the potential of RFT, think about Contoso Wellness, a fictitious wealth advisory agency. Utilizing RFT, the o4-mini mannequin realized to adapt to distinctive enterprise guidelines, similar to figuring out optimum shopper interactions primarily based on nuanced patterns just like the ratio of a shopper’s web price to obtainable funds. This enabled Contoso to streamline their onboarding processes and make extra knowledgeable choices sooner.
Supervised High quality-Tuning now obtainable for GPT-4.1-nano
We’re additionally bringing Supervised High quality-Tuning (SFT) to the GPT-4.1-nano mannequin—a small however highly effective basis mannequin optimized for high-throughput, cost-sensitive workloads. With SFT, you possibly can instill your mannequin with company-specific tone, terminology, workflows, and structured outputs—all tailor-made to your area. This mannequin might be obtainable for fine-tuning within the coming days.
Why High quality-tune GPT-4.1-nano?
- Precision at Scale: Tailor the mannequin’s responses whereas sustaining pace and effectivity.
- Enterprise-Grade Output: Guarantee alignment with enterprise processes and tone-of-voice.
- Light-weight and Deployable: Good for situations the place latency and price matter—similar to customer support bots, on-device processing, or high-volume doc parsing.
In comparison with bigger fashions, 4.1-nano delivers sooner inference and decrease compute prices, making it nicely suited to large-scale workloads like:
- Buyer assist automation, the place fashions should deal with hundreds of tickets per hour with constant tone and accuracy.
- Inside information assistants that comply with firm fashion and protocol in summarizing documentation or responding to FAQs.
As a small, quick, however extremely succesful mannequin, GPT-4.1-nano makes an excellent candidate for distillation as nicely. You need to use fashions like GPT-4.1 or o4 to generate coaching knowledge—or seize manufacturing site visitors with saved completions—and train 4.1-nano to be simply as good!
Llama 4 High quality-Tuning now obtainable
We’re additionally excited to announce assist for fine-tuning Meta’s Llama 4 Scout—a innovative,17 billion energetic parameter mannequin which presents an business main context window of 10M tokens whereas becoming on a single H100 GPU for inferencing. It’s a best-in-class mannequin, and extra highly effective than all earlier technology llama fashions.
Llama 4 fine-tuning is out there in our managed compute providing, permitting you to fine-tune and inference utilizing your personal GPU quota. Accessible in each Azure AI Foundry and as Azure Machine Studying elements, you might have entry to extra hyperparameters for deeper customization in comparison with our serverless expertise.
Get began with Azure AI Foundry immediately
Azure AI Foundry is your basis for enterprise-grade AI tuning. These fine-tuning enhancements unlock new frontiers in mannequin customization, serving to you construct clever techniques that assume and reply in ways in which mirror your corporation DNA.
- Use Reinforcement High quality-tuning with o4-mini to construct reasoning engines that study from expertise and evolve over time. Coming quickly in Azure AI Foundry, with regional availability for East US2 and Sweden Central.
- Use Supervised High quality-Tuning with 4.1-nano to scale dependable, cost-efficient, and extremely personalized mannequin behaviors throughout your group. Accessible now in Azure AI Foundry in North Central US and Sweden Central.
- Strive Llama 4 scout superb tuning to customise a best-in-class open supply mannequin. Accessible now in Azure AI Foundry mannequin catalog and Azure Machine Studying.
With Azure AI Foundry, fine-tuning isn’t nearly accuracy—it’s about belief, effectivity, and flexibility at each layer of your stack.
Discover additional:
We’re simply getting began. Keep tuned for extra mannequin assist, superior tuning methods, and instruments that can assist you construct AI that’s smarter, safer, and uniquely yours.
