Fine-tuning Phi-4 with Azure ML

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:06:14 +0000

Recently, I dedicated quite a lot of room on this blog to the topic of running Phi locally. This time, I want to focus on a different aspect of adopting small language models like Phi - fine-tuning them. I already covered local fine-tuning in the past, so today we are going to do this with Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML).

Azure ML is a comprehensive cloud service for accelerating and managing the machine learning project lifecycle. While local fine-tuning is great, moving to Azure ML makes a lot of sense when you need to scale, and/or when you want to experience the Nvidia GPUs without investing in hardware.

We are going to do LoRA fine-tuning of a Phi-4 model, and then deploy it to a managed batch endpoint for inference.

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Fine-tuning Phi-4 with Azure ML