A1 — first tool-calling specialist

Base: qwen3-4b-instruct-2507 · Method: LoRA SFT (rank 16, layer-wise LR decay) · Ship gate: +3pp on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) over the stock base.

A1 is the north-star validator for the Mac-first specialist factory: prove that a from-a-laptop LoRA can measurably beat the base on a public function-calling benchmark.

Build it

BFCL_ROOT=~/bfcl DATA=tools.jsonl bash scripts/recipes/a1-tool-caller.sh

The recipe (scripts/recipes/a1-tool-caller.sh) runs four shipped steps:

1. Baseline — eval-bfcl <base> → baseline.jsonl.
2. Train — sft <base> --data tools.jsonl --rank 16 --steps 2000 --llrd 0.9 → a1.lora. (--llrd is B15 layer-wise LR decay.)
3. Adapter eval — eval-bfcl <base> --lora a1.lora → candidate.jsonl (the --lora passthrough added for this PRD serves base+adapter for BFCL).
4. Gate — eval-gate --baseline baseline.jsonl --candidate candidate.jsonl --threshold 3 (B32); non-zero exit if the adapter doesn’t clear +3pp.

Data

DATA is a chatml SFT JSONL of {instruction, input?, response} tool-calling examples (e.g. an xLAM / glaive-function-calling export, or posttrainllm synthesize output). The recipe is data-agnostic; the gate is the contract.

Acceptance

BFCL_ROOT=~/bfcl ADAPTER=specialists/a1-tool-caller/a1.lora bash evals/a1-acceptance.sh

Re-runs the +3pp gate from a clean checkout against a built adapter.

Status

Recipe + acceptance harness shipped (2026-06-20); the training run is pending a GPU Mac + a local BFCL checkout — eval-bfcl/sft/eval-gate exist and are wired, but the 4B adapter has not been trained or scored here. Fill in the achieved BFCL delta + leaderboard row once the run completes.

Reuse

This recipe is the template for the specialist family: B1 (second domain), B8 (multilingual), B25 (compression). Cookie-cut the four steps, swap DATA and the eval suite.