Summary

Adds Optuna-powered hyperparameter optimization as a drop-in replacement for RFGridSearch / RFRandomSearch. Optuna's Bayesian samplers (TPE, CMA-ES) and pruners (Median, Hyperband) now work natively with RapidFire's chunk-based/epoch-based fit loop and shard-based evals loop, enabling smarter search and early stopping of underperforming runs.

What's included

Core Optuna engine (rapidfireai/automl/optuna_search.py — new, ~815 lines)

• RFOptuna class — user-facing AutoMLAlgorithm subclass that creates an Optuna study, samples initial configs via get_runs()
• Supports TPE, CMA-ES, and Random samplers; Median and Hyperband pruners
• OptunaChunkCallback — fit-mode callback that reports training metrics to Optuna after each chunk, evaluates trial.should_prune(), and suggests replacement configs within a budget
• OptunaShardCallback — evals-mode callback that does the same for pipeline shards

Extended Range / List datatypes (rapidfireai/automl/datatypes.py)

• Range now supports log=True (log-uniform sampling) and step=... (discrete stepped sampling), matching Optuna's full FloatDistribution / IntDistribution variants
• Backward compatible — existing Range(start, end) calls work unchanged

Packaging (pyproject.toml)

• Optuna added as optional dependency: pip install rapidfireai[optuna]
• Conditional import with a helpful stub error message when Optuna is not installed

Tutorial notebooks

• tutorial_notebooks/fine-tuning/rf-tutorial-optuna-sft-chatqa-tiny.ipynb — SFT fine-tuning with Optuna
• tutorial_notebooks/rag-contexteng/rf-tutorial-optuna-rag-fiqa.ipynb — RAG evals with Optuna

Usage example

from rapidfireai import Experiment
from rapidfireai.automl import RFOptuna, RFModelConfig, RFSFTConfig, Range, List

config = RFOptuna(
    configs=[RFModelConfig(
        model_name="model",
        training_args=RFSFTConfig(learning_rate=Range(1e-6, 1e-3, log=True)),
    )],
    trainer_type="SFT",
    n_initial=8,
    budget=20,
    objective="minimize:eval_loss",
    sampler="tpe",
    pruner="median",
    granularity="epoch",   # or "chunk" (default)
)

exp = Experiment("my_optuna_experiment")
exp.run_fit(config, create_model_fn, train_data, eval_data, num_chunks=8)

Tests

• Tested both Optuna notebooks end-to-end with: Multiple search space configurations and pruner choices, Single-objective and multi-objective optimization,
• Tested SFT-lite notebook and RAG FiQA notebook
• All scenarios additionally validated with ICOps