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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…

Fine-tuning large language models can improve task specific performance, although a general understanding of what the fine-tuned model has learned, forgotten and how to trust its predictions is still missing. We derive principled…

Lifelong multimodal agents must continuously adapt to new tasks through post-training, but this creates a fundamental tension between acquiring capabilities and preserving safety alignment. We demonstrate that fine-tuning aligned…

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most widely used techniques for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). By introducing a small number of trainable low-rank weight matrices, LoRA substantially reduces the number of parameters that…

The fine-tuning paradigm has emerged as a prominent approach for addressing long-tail learning tasks in the era of foundation models. However, the impact of fine-tuning strategies on long-tail learning performance remains unexplored. In…

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Large Transformer-based language models are pre-trained on corpora of varying sizes, for a different number of steps and with different batch sizes. At the same time, more fundamental components, such as the pre-training objective or…

Better cross-lingual alignment is often assumed to yield better cross-lingual transfer. However, explicit alignment techniques -- despite increasing embedding similarity -- frequently fail to improve token-level downstream performance. In…

Although the pre-training followed by fine-tuning paradigm is used extensively in many fields, there is still some controversy surrounding the impact of pre-training on the fine-tuning process. Currently, experimental findings based on text…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated excellent performance in text embedding tasks. Previous work usually use LoRA to fine-tune existing LLMs, which are limited by the data and training gap between LLMs and embedding…

We consider small-data, large-scale decision problems in which a firm must make many operational decisions simultaneously (e.g., across a large product portfolio) while observing only a few, potentially noisy, data points per instance.…

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…

Recent advances in language modeling consist in pretraining highly parameterized neural networks on extremely large web-mined text corpora. Training and inference with such models can be costly in practice, which incentivizes the use of…

Estimating how often an ML model will fail at deployment scale is central to pre-deployment safety assessment, but a feasible evaluation set is rarely large enough to observe the failures that matter. Jones et al. (2025) address this by…

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is…

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks through fine-tuning. However, fine-tuned models still suffer from overconfident predictions, especially in…

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can be accurately fine-tuned for downstream text processing tasks. Recently, researchers have introduced several parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods that optimize input prompts or adjust a small number…

We study the problem of fine-tuning a language model (LM) for a target task by optimally using the information from $n$ auxiliary tasks. This problem has broad applications in NLP, such as targeted instruction tuning and data selection in…