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Large pretrained language models (PLMs) are often domain- or task-adapted via fine-tuning or prompting. Finetuning requires modifying all of the parameters and having enough data to avoid overfitting while prompting requires no training and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-11 Zejiang Hou , Julian Salazar , George Polovets

Compared to other language tasks, applying pre-trained language models (PLMs) for search ranking often requires more nuances and training signals. In this paper, we identify and study the two mismatches between pre-training and ranking…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Xiaomeng Hu , Shi Yu , Chenyan Xiong , Zhenghao Liu , Zhiyuan Liu , Ge Yu

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights the power of scaling test-time compute to achieve strong performance on complex tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. This raises a critical question: how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Feng Chen , Allan Raventos , Nan Cheng , Surya Ganguli , Shaul Druckmann

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Fei Wang , Baochun Li

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, even stronger LLMs are susceptible to acquiring erroneous or obsolete information from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Shiwen Ni , Dingwei Chen , Chengming Li , Xiping Hu , Ruifeng Xu , Min Yang

Fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper aims to provide an in-depth interpretation of the fine-tuning process through circuit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Xu Wang , Yan Hu , Wenyu Du , Reynold Cheng , Benyou Wang , Difan Zou

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

Explicit reasoning models are trained to produce intermediate reasoning traces before final answers, but downstream fine-tuning is often performed on ordinary instruction-response data that contains no such traces. We show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Lukas Twist , Helen Yannakoudakis , Jie M. Zhang

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the unique capability to understand and generate human-like text from input queries. When fine-tuned, these models show enhanced performance on domain-specific queries. OpenAI highlights the process of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Scott Barnett , Zac Brannelly , Stefanus Kurniawan , Sheng Wong

Fine-tuning has proven to be highly effective in adapting pre-trained models to perform better on new desired tasks with minimal data samples. Among the most widely used approaches are reparameterization methods, which update a target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Aymane El Firdoussi , El Mahdi Chayti , Mohamed El Amine Seddik , Martin Jaggi

We explore efficient strategies to fine-tune decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream text classification under resource constraints. Two approaches are investigated: (1) attaching a classification head to a pretrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Amirhossein Yousefiramandi , Ciaran Cooney

Reinforcement learning (RL) yields substantial improvements in large language models (LLMs) downstream task performance and alignment with human values. Surprisingly, such large gains result from updating only a small subnetwork comprising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Hao Peng

The latest advancements in unsupervised learning of sentence embeddings predominantly involve employing contrastive learning-based (CL-based) fine-tuning over pre-trained language models. In this study, we analyze the latest sentence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Euna Jung , Jaeill Kim , Jungmin Ko , Jinwoo Park , Wonjong Rhee

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models has become the de facto strategy for developing both task-specific and general-purpose machine learning systems, including developing models that are safe to deploy. Despite its clear importance, there…

Fine-tuning adapts a pre-trained model to downstream tasks using a small amount of labeled data. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is an efficient fine-tuning method that reduces memory and computation costs while often achieving performance close…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ali Zindari , Rotem Mulayoff , Sebastian U. Stich

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chengpeng Li , Guanting Dong , Keming Lu , Chuanqi Tan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

Large language models are increasingly applied to materials science, yet fundamental questions remain about their reliability and knowledge encoding. Evaluating 25 LLMs across four materials science tasks -- over 200 base and fine-tuned…

Materials Science · Physics 2026-03-03 Vineeth Venugopal , Soroush Mahjoubi , Elsa Olivetti

We propose pre-finetuning, an additional large-scale learning stage between language model pre-training and fine-tuning. Pre-finetuning is massively multi-task learning (around 50 datasets, over 4.8 million total labeled examples), and is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-28 Armen Aghajanyan , Anchit Gupta , Akshat Shrivastava , Xilun Chen , Luke Zettlemoyer , Sonal Gupta

In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Fırat Öncel , Matthias Bethge , Beyza Ermis , Mirco Ravanelli , Cem Subakan , Çağatay Yıldız