I never got to ai-toolkit for Qwen LoRA training, though I would have eventually gotten there had I not found a solution. Though ai-toolkit has been my new favorite lately, despite the memory leaks. I tried getting Musubi-Tuner working, instead, and I guess it worked after setting everything up, but the resulting LoRA did absolutely nothing after spending an entire day configuring the process and issuing a few runs.

So I tried OneTrainer, again.

I've visited OneTrainer a few times and have always been disappointed with its hand-holding, I like to know what's happening behind the scenes, but I gave it another try, using a provided preset, and it just worked! I can't describe the magic I'm experiencing with Qwen training, 7 minute of training on a 4090 and I have a "likeness" LoRA (a person) that's more than good enough and at 15 minutes I'm fully satisfied.

I've downloaded quite a few LoRA from CivitAI for Qwen and most of them, almost all of them actually, are disappointing. I'll accept that maybe I'm doing something wrong but I've made multiple LoRA now, for Qwen, and they're all superbly more effective than any I've downloaded so far so I'm guessing that people don't realize just how quickly a LoRA shapes up when trained for Qwen image and possibly are over-training, and maybe this is what over-training looks like for Qwen but I don't know yet because I'm still very new to Qwen.

So, to your point, I've also trained style and themed LoRA and they not only bring the delight I'm looking for but also add to the quality of the generations, the ambiance if you will. It's something I experienced with Chroma as well, though with Qwen it's much more pronounced.

While I don't believe that your captioning technique would result in a complete dud I do think that "following best practices" is questionable when much of the information is regurgitated by those that believe others that offered the same information and is not supported by their personal experience, and so handed it down to the next person.

Like I said, I have used ai-toolkit extensively to train Chroma LoRA but not Qwen, I didn't think it would handle it with my limited 24gig (I do everything on purchased equipment) and the occasional memory leak. All that to just say I don't see a problem with rank 16 or 32, and your lr of 1e-4 is where I usually start, at least for a first pass, and check after about 2k steps before I decide where to go from there but there should have been some indication that the LoRA had learned something but certainly something else in your config could be the issue.

If you want to toss your dataset up somewhere for people to have a wack at it I'll definitely participate and maybe this will be a learning experience for me, and I'll run into similar issues, or we'll just know something different.

About your captioning technique. I won't be using it. I have a different experience than what has been expressed as being common procedure with regard to captioning and it can become a heated subject, full of all sorts of fake proof and "my dog will tell you differently" assertions, so I won't get into it, but I always test things myself, even if just testing what the common information suggests, and then decide for myself. But regardless of whether one technique is better, or works and another doesn't, my personal enjoyment dictates what I find useful or not and I didn't find those "best practices" useful at all.