thealper2/lfm2-700m-linux-command
thealper2/lfm2-700m-linux-command
LiquidAI/LFM2-700M fine-tuned to map a natural-language Linux task to a single shell command. The target output is the command only; no explanation is produced.
Model details
Prompt format
The model uses the LFM2 ChatML-style chat template and was trained with no system prompt. Apply the template rather than constructing the string manually.
<|startoftext|><|im_start|>user
Find which process is using port 8080.<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
lsof -i :8080<|im_end|>Two LFM2 tokenizer details matter:
- The chat template emits
bos_tokenitself andadd_bos_tokenistrueintokenizer_config.json. Tokenise templated text withadd_special_tokens=False, or the sequence gets a duplicated BOS. - Decode with
clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False; the BPE cleanup step strips spaces around punctuation and can corrupt shell commands.
Special tokens: BOS <|startoftext|> (1), EOS <|im_end|> (7), PAD <|pad|> (0).
Usage
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model_id = "thealper2/lfm2-700m-linux-command"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id, clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype=torch.bfloat16).to("cuda").eval()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Find which process is using port 8080."}]
prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True, tokenize=False)
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt", add_special_tokens=False).to(model.device)
output = model.generate(
**inputs,
max_new_tokens=128,
do_sample=False, # deterministic decoding
eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
pad_token_id=tokenizer.pad_token_id,
)
command = tokenizer.decode(output[0, inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True).strip()
print(command) # lsof -i :8080Greedy decoding (do_sample=False) is the intended configuration: the task has a single intended answer and sampling only adds variance.
Training data
Both were normalised to {instruction, command, source} and then:
- Cleaned — markdown fences and
$/#prompt prefixes stripped, whitespace runs collapsed outside quoted strings, records with unbalanced quotes, prose instead of a command, or no parseable utility dropped. Commands themselves were never rewritten. - Deduplicated — exact
(instruction, command)duplicates removed. Rows sharing a command with a different instruction, or an instruction with a different valid command, were kept deliberately. - Balanced —
findwas 35.2% of the raw corpus. It was capped per-utility using a diversity-aware ordering that retains every distinct flag signature before retaining any repeat, lowering its share to ~19%. - Split — 90/5/5, grouped by instruction template (filenames, paths, numbers and quoted literals abstracted) so templated paraphrases cannot straddle the train/test boundary.
Split sizes: 11756 train / 652 validation / 653 test. Leakage checks report zero overlap across splits at the exact-pair, instruction and instruction-template level.
Training configuration
Loss is computed on the assistant turn only; prompt tokens are masked with -100.
max_length was chosen from the tokenised length distribution of the corpus (mean 37.7, median 34, p90 57, p95 66, p99 87, max 403) — a 128-token budget covers 99.94% of examples.
Run record
Evaluation
Measured on the held-out test set with greedy decoding.
Metric definitions:
- Exact match — string equality after stripping surrounding whitespace.
- Normalised exact match — equality after collapsing whitespace runs outside quotes and removing a trailing
;. - Structural match — utility, flag multiset (short-flag bundles expanded for utilities that use them) and operand sequence compared per pipeline segment. Recognises
ls -la==ls -al. - Command validity — the output parses under a bash grammar parser (
bashlex), not membership in a list of known utilities. - Token F1 — token-level overlap, as partial credit.
- Primary-utility accuracy — the first utility matches the reference.
- Prose-output rate — fraction of outputs that read as an explanation rather than a command.
Limitations
- Structural match is not a semantic oracle. It compares command shape. It cannot tell that
find . -name '*.py'and a shell glob achieve the same result, and it does not reason about flag semantics. It is an upper bound on exact match, not semantic accuracy. - Exact match understates correctness. Many Linux tasks have several valid answers; the test set carries one reference each.
- Source-distribution bias.
nl2bashisfind-heavy and composition-heavy;mecha-org/linux-command-datasetis templated and single-utility-heavy. Per-source metrics differ and are reported separately in the project reports. - Distribution shift. Commands reference paths, hosts and variables that appear in the training corpora (
/path/to/...,$source). Outputs may embed those placeholders instead of the user's real paths. - Short outputs only. Trained at a 128-token budget; long multi-stage scripts are out of distribution.
- No verification of correctness or safety at generation time. The model can produce syntactically valid but wrong — or destructive — commands.
Intended use and safety
Intended for generating candidate shell commands for review, and as the command generator of a sandboxed terminal agent.
Do not execute generated commands directly on a host. The project this model comes from executes commands only inside a disposable Docker container started with --network none, --read-only, --cap-drop ALL, --security-opt no-new-privileges, a non-root user, no host bind mounts, bounded CPU/memory/PIDs and a wall-clock timeout, and screens commands against a destructive-pattern list and a read-only allowlist before running them.
License
Inherits the LFM Open License v1.0 of the base model, LiquidAI/LFM2-700M. Dataset licenses apply to the training data: mecha-org/linux-command-dataset is Apache-2.0; nl2bash derives from the TellinaTool/nl2bash corpus.
Citation
The NL2Bash corpus:
@inproceedings{LinWZE2018:NL2Bash,
author = {Xi Victoria Lin and Chenglong Wang and Luke Zettlemoyer and Michael D. Ernst},
title = {NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating System},
booktitle = {LREC 2018},
year = {2018}
}