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Related papers: Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning

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While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Preference-based finetuning of vision--language models (VLMs) is brittle: trivially wrong negatives inject uninformative gradients that destabilize training. We recast alignment as \textbf{learning-dynamics--aware optimization} and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Jusheng Zhang , Kaitong Cai , Jing Yang , Keze Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned for specific domains exhibit strong performance; however, the underlying mechanisms by which this fine-tuning reshapes their parametric space are not well understood. Prior works primarily focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Eshaan Tanwar , Deepak Nathani , William Yang Wang , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Learning from preference labels plays a crucial role in fine-tuning large language models. There are several distinct approaches for preference fine-tuning, including supervised learning, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL), and…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Itay Itzhak , Yonatan Belinkov , Gabriel Stanovsky

This paper explores an intriguing observation: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with responses generated by a LLM often yields better results than using responses generated by humans, particularly in reasoning tasks. We conduct an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Xuan Ren , Biao Wu , Lingqiao Liu

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

Recently, preference optimization methods such as DPO have significantly enhanced large language models (LLMs) in wide tasks including dialogue and question-answering. However, current methods fail to account for the varying difficulty…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Jingyuan Ma , Rui Li , Zheng Li , Lei Sha , Zhifang Sui

We present an outcome-driven fine-tuning framework that enhances the forecasting capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without relying on human-curated reasoning samples. Our method leverages model self-play to generate pairs of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Benjamin Turtel , Danny Franklin , Philipp Schoenegger

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifu Han , Geo Zhang

Understanding the process of learning in neural networks is crucial for improving their performance and interpreting their behavior. This can be approximately understood by asking how a model's output is influenced when we fine-tune on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jordan K. Matelsky , Lyle Ungar , Konrad P. Kording

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Martin Klissarov , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Bogdan Mazoure

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Runsheng Yu , Yong Wang , Xiaoqi Jiao , Youzhi Zhang , James T. Kwok

Preference alignment has become a crucial component in enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its impact in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains comparatively underexplored. Similar to language models,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Elmira Amirloo , Jean-Philippe Fauconnier , Christoph Roesmann , Christian Kerl , Rinu Boney , Yusu Qian , Zirui Wang , Afshin Dehghan , Yinfei Yang , Zhe Gan , Peter Grasch

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness critically depends on the selection of training data. Recent advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Yixiu Mao , Yun Qu , Qi Wang , Heming Zou , Xiangyang Ji

Prior works have shown that fine-tuning on new knowledge can induce factual hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), leading to incorrect outputs when evaluated on previously known information. However, the specific manifestations of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Renfei Dang , Peng Hu , Zhejian Lai , Changjiang Gao , Min Zhang , Shujian Huang

Learning from preference feedback has emerged as an essential step for improving the generation quality and performance of modern language models (LMs). Despite its widespread use, the way preference-based learning is applied varies wildly,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Hamish Ivison , Yizhong Wang , Jiacheng Liu , Zeqiu Wu , Valentina Pyatkin , Nathan Lambert , Noah A. Smith , Yejin Choi , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, motivating researchers to investigate their potential use in recommendation systems. However, directly applying LLMs to recommendation tasks has…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhuoxi Bai , Ning Wu , Fengyu Cai , Xinyi Zhu , Yun Xiong

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman