Related papers: Fine-tuning Reinforcement Learning Models is Secre…

Transfer learning is a popular method for tuning pretrained (upstream) models for different downstream tasks using limited data and computational resources. We study how an adversary with control over an upstream model used in transfer…

We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…

The modern paradigm in machine learning involves pre-training on diverse data, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this translates to learning via offline RL on a diverse historical dataset, followed by…

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained language models (e.g., multilingual BERT) to downstream cross-lingual tasks has shown promising results. However, the fine-tuning process inevitably changes the parameters of the pre-trained model and…

In data-rich domains such as vision, language, and speech, deep learning prevails to deliver high-performance task-specific models and can even learn general task-agnostic representations for efficient finetuning to downstream tasks.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective…

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown promise for training LLM agents to perform multi-turn decision-making based on environment feedback. However, most existing evaluations remain largely in-domain: training and testing are conducted…

Existing research has shown that a multilingual pre-trained language model fine-tuned with one (source) language also performs well on downstream tasks for non-source languages, even though no fine-tuning is done on these languages.…

Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will…

Backdoor attacks represent one of the major threats to machine learning models. Various efforts have been made to mitigate backdoors. However, existing defenses have become increasingly complex and often require high computational resources…

Pre-training has exhibited notable benefits to downstream tasks by boosting accuracy and speeding up convergence, but the exact reasons for these benefits still remain unclear. To this end, we propose to quantitatively and explicitly…

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is a critical stage in modern language model development, playing a key role in improving alignment and reasoning ability. However, several phenomena remain poorly understood, including the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

We propose incremental (re)training of a neural network model to cope with a continuous flow of new data in inference during model serving. As such, this is a life-long learning process. We address two challenges of life-long retraining:…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

Machine unlearning (MUL) refers to the problem of making a pre-trained model selectively forget some training instances or class(es) while retaining performance on the remaining dataset. Existing MUL research involves fine-tuning using a…

The pretraining-fine-tuning paradigm has been the de facto strategy for transfer learning in modern language modeling. With the understanding that task adaptation in LMs is often a function of parameters shared across tasks, we argue that a…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…