Implementation:Hiyouga LLaMA Factory Data Collator

Knowledge Sources	Hiyouga_LLaMA_Factory
Domains	Data Processing, Training
Last Updated	2026-02-06 19:00 GMT

Overview

Concrete data collators for batching multimodal and training-paradigm-specific inputs provided by LLaMA Factory.

Description

This module provides four data collator classes and one utility function that bridge tokenized dataset examples and model-ready batched tensors. The base class MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq extends HuggingFace's DataCollatorForSeq2Seq to handle images, videos, and audios, including generating fake multimodal inputs to prevent distributed training hangs when a batch contains no media. Three specialized subclasses handle different training paradigms:

SFTDataCollatorWith4DAttentionMask -- Adds 4D attention mask support for packed sequence training with block-diagonal attention
PairwiseDataCollatorWithPadding -- Reformats chosen/rejected pairs for DPO and reward modeling
KTODataCollatorWithPadding -- Handles KTO training with separate target and KL-reference inputs

The standalone prepare_4d_attention_mask function expands a 2D attention mask with packing indices into a 4D lower-triangular mask that prevents cross-sequence attention in packed batches.

Usage

These collators are instantiated by the training workflow based on the training stage and passed to the HuggingFace Trainer as the data_collator argument. They are called automatically during each training step to collate individual dataset examples into batched tensors.

Code Reference

Source Location

Repository: Hiyouga_LLaMA_Factory
File: src/llamafactory/data/collator.py
Lines: 1-331

Signature

def prepare_4d_attention_mask(
    attention_mask_with_indices: "torch.Tensor",
    dtype: "torch.dtype",
) -> "torch.Tensor": ...

@dataclass
class MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq(DataCollatorForSeq2Seq):
    template: Optional["Template"] = None
    processor: Optional["ProcessorMixin"] = None
    def __call__(self, features: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> dict[str, "torch.Tensor"]: ...

@dataclass
class SFTDataCollatorWith4DAttentionMask(MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq):
    block_diag_attn: bool = False
    attn_implementation: Literal["eager", "sdpa", "flash_attention_2"] = "eager"
    compute_dtype: "torch.dtype" = torch.float32
    def __call__(self, features: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> dict[str, "torch.Tensor"]: ...

@dataclass
class PairwiseDataCollatorWithPadding(MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq):
    def __call__(self, features: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> dict[str, "torch.Tensor"]: ...

@dataclass
class KTODataCollatorWithPadding(MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq):
    def __call__(self, features: list[dict[str, Any]]) -> dict[str, "torch.Tensor"]: ...

Import

from llamafactory.data.collator import (
    prepare_4d_attention_mask,
    MultiModalDataCollatorForSeq2Seq,
    SFTDataCollatorWith4DAttentionMask,
    PairwiseDataCollatorWithPadding,
    KTODataCollatorWithPadding,
)

I/O Contract

Inputs

Name	Type	Required	Description
features	list[dict[str, Any]]	Yes	List of tokenized examples, each containing input_ids, attention_mask, labels, and optionally images, videos, audios
template	Template	Yes	Chat template with multimodal plugin for processing media inputs
processor	ProcessorMixin	No	HuggingFace processor for multimodal models
model	PreTrainedModel	No	Model reference used for mRoPE position ID computation

Outputs

Name	Type	Description
batch	dict[str, torch.Tensor]	Batched tensors including input_ids, attention_mask, labels, and multimodal inputs (pixel_values, image_grid_thw, etc.)

Usage Examples

from llamafactory.data.collator import SFTDataCollatorWith4DAttentionMask

collator = SFTDataCollatorWith4DAttentionMask(
    tokenizer=tokenizer,
    model=model,
    template=template,
    processor=processor,
    block_diag_attn=True,
    attn_implementation="sdpa",
    compute_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
)

# Called by the Trainer during training
batch = collator(features)
# batch contains: input_ids, attention_mask (4D), labels, pixel_values, ...

Related Pages

Hiyouga_LLaMA_Factory_Chat_Template - Template class used for multimodal plugin access
Hiyouga_LLaMA_Factory_Multimodal_Plugin - Plugin system invoked to generate mm_inputs
Hiyouga_LLaMA_Factory_Data_Loader - Dataset loading pipeline that produces the features consumed by collators

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Principle

Implementation

Heuristic

Environment