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This paper introduces a multifaceted methodology for fine-tuning and evaluating large language models (LLMs) for specialized monetization tasks. The goal is to balance general language proficiency with domain-specific skills. The…

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…

Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we…

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, as required by current scaling laws. Most progress is made for English, given its abundance of high-quality pretraining data. For most other languages, however, such high…

Modern language models often have open weights but closed training data. We formalize the problem of data approximation from model weights and propose several baselines and metrics. We develop a gradient-based approach that selects the…

Curriculum learning-organizing training data from easy to hard-has improved efficiency across machine learning domains, yet remains underexplored for language model pretraining. We present the first systematic investigation of curriculum…

Generalization performance of classifiers in deep learning has recently become a subject of intense study. Deep models, typically over-parametrized, tend to fit the training data exactly. Despite this "overfitting", they perform well on…

The in-context learning ability of large language models (LLMs) enables them to generalize to novel downstream tasks with relatively few labeled examples. However, they require enormous computational resources to be deployed. Alternatively,…

The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through post-training reveals a pronounced generalization gap: models fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning (RL) consistently achieve superior out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In…

In this paper, we propose a ``Generalization Stress Test" to assess Large Language Models' (LLMs) generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. We…

Memorization in large language models (LLMs) makes them vulnerable to data extraction attacks. While pre-training memorization has been extensively studied, fewer works have explored its impact in fine-tuning, particularly for LoRA…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs considerable training costs, driving the need for data-efficient training with optimised data ordering. Human-inspired strategies offer a solution by organising data based on human learning…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained and tested extensively on symbolic representations such as code and graphs, yet real-world user tasks are often specified in natural language. To what extent can LLMs generalize across these…

Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or…

Foundation language models learn from their finetuning input context in different ways. In this paper, we reformulate inputs during finetuning for challenging translation tasks, leveraging model strengths from pretraining in novel ways to…

In the rapidly advancing arena of large language models (LLMs), a key challenge is to enhance their capabilities amid a looming shortage of high-quality training data. Our study starts from an empirical strategy for the light continual…

Large language models are usually fine-tuned to align with human preferences. However, fine-tuning a large language model can be challenging. In this work, we introduce $\textit{weak-to-strong search}$, framing the alignment of a large…

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate reasonable zero-shot capability across many downstream tasks, fine-tuning is a common practice to improve their performance. However, a task's data efficiency--i.e., the number of fine-tuning…

Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes available. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant…