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Related papers: A Kernel-Based View of Language Model Fine-Tuning

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Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Jiali Zeng , Yufan Jiang , Shuangzhi Wu , Yongjing Yin , Mu Li

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has emerged as a powerful tool to provide memorization, optimization and generalization guarantees in deep neural networks. A line of work has studied the NTK spectrum for two-layer and deep networks with at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-23 Simone Bombari , Mohammad Hossein Amani , Marco Mondelli

Pre-trained neural language models bring significant improvement for various NLP tasks, by fine-tuning the models on task-specific training sets. During fine-tuning, the parameters are initialized from pre-trained models directly, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Chengyu Wang , Minghui Qiu , Jun Huang , Xiaofeng He

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

Given the complexity of genetic risk prediction, there is a critical need for the development of novel methodologies that can effectively capture intricate genotype--phenotype relationships (e.g., nonlinear) while remaining statistically…

Applications · Statistics 2025-10-03 Heng Ge , Qing Lu

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, its theoretical understanding of representation learning remains limited. Deep neural kernels provide a principled framework to interpret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yong-Ming Tian , Shuang Liang , Shao-Qun Zhang , Feng-Lei Fan

The study of deep neural networks (DNNs) in the infinite-width limit, via the so-called neural tangent kernel (NTK) approach, has provided new insights into the dynamics of learning, generalization, and the impact of initialization. One key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Sina Alemohammad , Zichao Wang , Randall Balestriero , Richard Baraniuk

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) framework explains optimization in over-parameterized neural networks via approximately linearized dynamics, yielding exponential convergence guarantees. However, existing results are often overly pessimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruchirinkil Marreddy , Chaoyue Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across widespread tasks, yet their application in low-resource domains remains a significant challenge due to data scarcity and the high risk of overfitting. While in-domain data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Pingjie Wang , Hongcheng Liu , Yusheng Liao , Ziqing Fan , Yaxin Du , Shuo Tang , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is the wide-network limit of a kernel defined using neural networks at initialization, whose embedding is the gradient of the output of the network with respect to its parameters. We study the "after kernel",…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Philip M. Long

Recently, prompt tuning \cite{lester2021power} has gradually become a new paradigm for NLP, which only depends on the representation of the words by freezing the parameters of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to obtain remarkable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-31 Pan He , Yuxi Chen , Yan Wang , Yanru Zhang

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has discovered connections between deep neural networks and kernel methods with insights of optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, recent works report that NTK can achieve better performances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Insu Han , Haim Avron , Neta Shoham , Chaewon Kim , Jinwoo Shin

A recent breakthrough in deep learning theory shows that the training of over-parameterized deep neural networks can be characterized by a kernel function called \textit{neural tangent kernel} (NTK). However, it is known that this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Zixiang Chen , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for various NLP tasks. Pre-training is usually independent of the downstream task, and previous works have shown that this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Tanish Lad , Himanshu Maheshwari , Shreyas Kottukkal , Radhika Mamidi

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has achieved remarkable results in many NLP tasks. However, it is unclear why the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm can improve performance and generalization capability across different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-16 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Ke Xu

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) framework has provided deep insights into the training dynamics of neural networks under gradient flow. However, it relies on the assumption that the network is differentiable with respect to its parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Sriram Nagaraj , Vishakh Hari

We study the problem of fine-tuning a language model (LM) for a target task by optimally using the information from $n$ auxiliary tasks. This problem has broad applications in NLP, such as targeted instruction tuning and data selection in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Dongyue Li , Ziniu Zhang , Lu Wang , Hongyang R. Zhang

In multi-objective optimization, multiple loss terms are weighted and added together to form a single objective. These weights are chosen to properly balance the competing losses according to some meta-goal. For example, in physics-informed…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Max Hirsch , Federico Pichi

For certain infinitely-wide neural networks, the neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory fully characterizes generalization, but for the networks used in practice, the empirical NTK only provides a rough first-order approximation. Still, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Guillermo Ortiz-Jiménez , Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli , Pascal Frossard

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Zhengxiang Shi , Aldo Lipani