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Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Francesca Lucchetti , Arjun Guha

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable advancements by leveraging tools to interact with environments, a critical step toward generalized AI. However, the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approach, which relies on large-scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Junjie Ye , Yilong Wu , Sixian Li , Yuming Yang , Zhiheng Xi , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan , Zhengyin Du

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has been achieved through a combo of instruction tuning and human alignment. However, building manually crafted instruction datasets and performing human alignment become the bottleneck…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Tao Feng , Zifeng Wang , Jimeng Sun

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

Multimodal foundation models integrate heterogeneous signals across modalities, yet it remains poorly understood how their predictions depend on specific internal feature groups and whether such reliance can be deliberately controlled.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hyunsuk Chung , Caren Han , Yerin Choi , Seungyeon Ji , Jinwoo Kim , Eun-Jung Holden , Kyungreem Han

Instruction tuning significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks. However, the procedure to optimizing the mixing of instruction datasets for LLM fine-tuning is still poorly understood. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Renxi Wang , Haonan Li , Minghao Wu , Yuxia Wang , Xudong Han , Chiyu Zhang , Timothy Baldwin

The purpose of instruction tuning is enabling zero-shot performance, but instruction tuning has also been shown to improve chain-of-thought reasoning and value alignment (Si et al., 2023). Here we consider the impact on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Constanza Fierro , Jiaang Li , Anders Søgaard

Instruction tuning (IT) is crucial to tailoring large language models (LLMs) towards human-centric interactions. Recent advancements have shown that the careful selection of a small, high-quality subset of IT data can significantly enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Liangxin Liu , Xuebo Liu , Derek F. Wong , Dongfang Li , Ziyi Wang , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

The fine-tuning paradigm in addressing long-tail learning tasks has sparked significant interest since the emergence of foundation models. Nonetheless, how fine-tuning impacts performance in long-tail learning was not explicitly quantified.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiang-Xin Shi , Tong Wei , Zhi Zhou , Jie-Jing Shao , Xin-Yan Han , Yu-Feng Li

We explore the internal mechanisms of how bias emerges in large language models (LLMs) when provided with ambiguous comparative prompts: inputs that compare or enforce choosing between two or more entities without providing clear context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Rishabh Adiga , Besmira Nushi , Varun Chandrasekaran

The output tendencies of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) vary markedly before and after Fine-Tuning (FT) due to the updates to the model parameters. These divergences in output tendencies result in a gap in the social biases of PLMs. For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Masahiro Kaneko , Danushka Bollegala , Timothy Baldwin

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Biao Zhang , Zhongtao Liu , Colin Cherry , Orhan Firat

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a popular class of techniques that strive to adapt large models in a scalable and resource-efficient manner. Yet, the mechanisms underlying their training performance and generalization remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zahra Rahimi Afzal , Tara Esmaeilbeig , Mojtaba Soltanalian , Mesrob I. Ohannessian

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guanlin Li , Kangjie Chen , Shangwei Guo , Jie Zhang , Han Qiu , Chao Zhang , Guoyin Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li

Instruction-following LLMs have recently allowed systems to discover hidden concepts from a collection of unstructured documents based on a natural language description of the purpose of the discovery (i.e., goal). Still, the quality of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Zhouhang Xie , Tushar Khot , Bhavana Dalvi Mishra , Harshit Surana , Julian McAuley , Peter Clark , Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder

Aligned instruction following models can better fulfill user requests than their unaligned counterparts. However, it has been shown that there is a length bias in evaluation of such models, and that training algorithms tend to exploit this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Weizhe Yuan , Ilia Kulikov , Ping Yu , Kyunghyun Cho , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston , Jing Xu

Model alignment with human preferences is an essential step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) helpful and consistent with human values. It typically consists of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yi Dong , Zhilin Wang , Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Xianchao Wu , Oleksii Kuchaiev

Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ahmed Alajrami , Xingwei Tan , Nikolaos Aletras