Related papers: When Fine-Tuning Fails: Lessons from MS MARCO Pass…

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Parameter-efficient methods like LoRA have revolutionised large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. ReLoRA extends this idea to pretraining by repeatedly merging and reinitialising low-rank adapters, increasing cumulative rank while keeping…

Large Language Models are traditionally finetuned on large instruction datasets. However recent studies suggest that small, high-quality datasets can suffice for general purpose instruction following. This lack of consensus surrounding…

Math reasoning has become the poster child of progress in large language models (LLMs), with new models rapidly surpassing human-level performance on benchmarks like MATH and AIME. But as math leaderboards improve week by week, it is worth…

Pre-training and fine-tuning is a paradigm for alleviating the data scarcity problem in end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST). The commonplace "modality gap" between speech and text data often leads to inconsistent inputs between…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning optimizes large, pre-trained foundation models by updating a subset of parameters; in this class, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is particularly effective. Inspired by an effort to investigate the different roles…

Finetuning Pretrained Language Models (PLM) for IR has been de facto the standard practice since their breakthrough effectiveness few years ago. But, is this approach well understood? In this paper, we study the impact of the pretraining…

While there has been much recent work studying how linguistic information is encoded in pre-trained sentence representations, comparatively little is understood about how these models change when adapted to solve downstream tasks. Using a…

Reasoning-oriented large language models (RLMs) achieve strong gains on tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating explicit intermediate reasoning. However, their impact on machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. We…

We conduct a behavioral exploration of LoRA fine-tuned LLMs for Passage Reranking to understand how relevance signals are learned and deployed by Large Language Models. By fine-tuning Mistral-7B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and Pythia-6.9B on MS MARCO…

Representation learning has been widely studied in the context of meta-learning, enabling rapid learning of new tasks through shared representations. Recent works such as MAML have explored using fine-tuning-based metrics, which measure the…

Two questions regarding practitioners' use of patent embeddings arise: (i) Does one fine-tuning recipe suffice for all downstream applications? (ii) Is fine-tuning on one patent landscape sufficient for downstream application on other…

Recent analysis on the training dynamics of Transformers has unveiled an interesting characteristic: the training loss plateaus for a significant number of training steps, and then suddenly (and sharply) drops to near--optimal values. To…

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adoption across a wide range of tasks, ranging from code generation to machine translation and sentiment analysis, etc. Red teaming/Safety alignment efforts show that…

Fine-tuning language models (LMs) has yielded success on diverse downstream tasks, but as LMs grow in size, backpropagation requires a prohibitively large amount of memory. Zeroth-order (ZO) methods can in principle estimate gradients using…

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow datasets can cause them to develop broadly misaligned behaviours: a phenomena known as emergent misalignment. However, the mechanisms underlying this misalignment, and why it generalizes beyond…

Fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a downstream task often degrades its original capabilities, a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". This is especially an issue when one does not have access to the data and recipe used to develop…

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on…

Geometric properties of Transformer weights, particularly the unembedding matrix, have been widely useful in language model interpretability research. Yet, their utility for estimating downstream performance remains unclear. In this work,…