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Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

While fine-tuning LLMs on NLI corpora improves their inferential performance, the underlying mechanisms driving this improvement remain largely opaque. In this work, we conduct a series of experiments to investigate what LLMs actually learn…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Liang Cheng , Zhaowei Wang , Mark Steedman

Various recent experimental results show that large language models (LLM) exhibit emergent abilities that are not present in small models. System performance is greatly improved after passing a certain critical threshold of scale. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Cheng-Shang Chang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shawn Im , Yixuan Li

Large language models (LLMs) have been able to perform various forms of reasoning tasks in a wide range of scenarios, but are they truly engaging in task abstraction and rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? To answer this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Guanyu Chen , Peiyang Wang , Yizhou Jiang , Yuqian Liu , Chujie Zhao , Ying Fang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

Large language models are being widely used across industries to generate content that contributes directly to key performance metrics, such as conversion rates. Pretrained models, however, often fall short when it comes to aligning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Erfan Loghmani

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on downstream tasks has become the de-facto learning paradigm in NLP. However, conventional approaches fine-tune all the parameters of the pre-trained model, which becomes prohibitive as the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Junxian He , Chunting Zhou , Xuezhe Ma , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Graham Neubig

Fine-tuning a pre-trained model, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), has been proven to be an effective method for solving many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, due to the large number of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Taha ValizadehAslani , Hualou Liang

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

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiao Wang , Yifei Zhang , YongKang Liu , Xiaocui Yang , Zihan Wang , Shi Feng , Daling Wang

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zishi Zhang , Jinhui Han , Ming Hu , Yijie Peng

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

This report examines the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating theoretical insights with practical applications. It outlines the historical evolution of LLMs from traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Venkatesh Balavadhani Parthasarathy , Ahtsham Zafar , Aafaq Khan , Arsalan Shahid

Fine-tuning-based unlearning methods prevail for preventing targeted harmful, sensitive, or copyrighted information within large language models while preserving overall capabilities. However, the true effectiveness of these methods is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yihuai Hong , Yuelin Zou , Lijie Hu , Ziqian Zeng , Di Wang , Haiqin Yang

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), have transformed natural language processing by improving generative capabilities. However, detecting biases embedded within these models remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Suvendu Mohanty

Large language models (LLMs) are frequently fine-tuned or unlearned to adapt to new tasks or eliminate undesirable behaviors. While existing evaluation methods assess performance after such interventions, there remains no general approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Aly M. Kassem , Zhuan Shi , Negar Rostamzadeh , Golnoosh Farnadi

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Jiaming Ji , Kaile Wang , Tianyi Qiu , Boyuan Chen , Jiayi Zhou , Changye Li , Hantao Lou , Juntao Dai , Yunhuai Liu , Yaodong Yang

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Kai Chen , Chunwei Wang , Kuo Yang , Jianhua Han , Lanqing Hong , Fei Mi , Hang Xu , Zhengying Liu , Wenyong Huang , Zhenguo Li , Dit-Yan Yeung , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become essential for adapting pretrained models to specific downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose Linear Chain Transformation (LinChain), a novel approach that introduces a sequence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yulong Wang , Chang Zuo , Yin Xuan , Hong Li , Ni Wei

The releases of powerful open-weight large language models (LLMs) are often not accompanied by access to their full training data. Existing interpretability methods, particularly those based on activations, often require or assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Ziqian Zhong , Aditi Raghunathan