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Related papers: Learning Dynamics of LLM Finetuning

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During the pretraining phase, large language models (LLMs) acquire vast amounts of knowledge from extensive text corpora. Nevertheless, in later stages such as fine-tuning and inference, the model may encounter knowledge not covered in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Bozhou Li , Hao Liang , Yang Li , Fangcheng Fu , Hongzhi Yin , Conghui He , Wentao Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Xiao Yu , Qingyang Wu , Yu Li , Zhou Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge and remarkable abilities from extensive text corpora, making them powerful tools for various applications. To make LLMs more usable, aligning them with human preferences is essential.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Mozhi Zhang , Pengyu Wang , Chenkun Tan , Mianqiu Huang , Dong Zhang , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations (i.e., unfaithful or nonsensical information) when serving as AI assistants in various domains. Since hallucinations always come with truthful content in the LLM responses, previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yuzhe Gu , Wenwei Zhang , Chengqi Lyu , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

There has been much recent, exciting work on combining the complementary strengths of latent variable models and deep learning. Latent variable modeling makes it easy to explicitly specify model constraints through conditional independence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-06 Yoon Kim , Sam Wiseman , Alexander M. Rush

Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Hyunji Lee , Seunghyun Yoon , Yunjae Won , Hanseok Oh , Geewook Kim , Trung Bui , Franck Dernoncourt , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal , Minjoon Seo

Preference optimization (PO) is indispensable for large language models (LLMs), with methods such as direct preference optimization (DPO) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) achieving great success. A common belief is that DPO is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yue Wang , Qizhou Wang , Zizhuo Zhang , Gang Niu , Bo Han , Masashi Sugiyama

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, they are prone to generating fluent yet untruthful responses, known as "hallucinations". Hallucinations can lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Minda Hu , Bowei He , Yufei Wang , Liangyou Li , Chen Ma , Irwin King

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a widely used training method for the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we explore an under-investigated aspect of DPO - its dependency on the reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Yixin Liu , Pengfei Liu , Arman Cohan

Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). While numerous studies have examined the impact of factors such as data volume and model size on English models, the scaling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chiyu Song , Zhanchao Zhou , Jianhao Yan , Yuejiao Fei , Zhenzhong Lan , Yue Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but often struggle to align with human preferences, leading to harmful or undesirable outputs. Preference learning, which trains models to distinguish between preferred…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Reinforcement learning is used to align language models with human preference signals after first pre-training the model to predict the next token of text within a large corpus using likelihood maximization. Before being deployed in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Alec Solway

We propose a new finetuning method to provide pre-trained large language models (LMs) the ability to scale test-time compute through the diffusion framework. By increasing the number of diffusion steps, we show our finetuned models achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Edoardo Cetin , Tianyu Zhao , Yujin Tang

Continual learning (CL) studies how models acquire tasks sequentially while retaining previously learned knowledge. Despite substantial progress in benchmarking CL methods, comparative evaluations typically keep the fine-tuning regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Paul-Tiberiu Iordache , Elena Burceanu

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Julian Minder , Clément Dumas , Stewart Slocum , Helena Casademunt , Cameron Holmes , Robert West , Neel Nanda

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ishan Jindal , Chandana Badrinath , Pranjal Bharti , Lakkidi Vinay , Sachin Dev Sharma

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Wei Lu , Rachel K. Luu , Markus J. Buehler