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Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Siyuan Lu , Zechuan Wang , Hongxuan Zhang , Qintong Wu , Leilei Gan , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu , Tao Lin

Fine-tuning language models on narrowly harmful data causes emergent misalignment (EM) -- behavioral failures extending far beyond training distributions. Recent work demonstrates compartmentalization of misalignment behind contextual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Rohan Saxena

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit unexpected errors or unintended behavior, even at scale. While recent work reveals the discrepancy between LLMs and humans in skill compositions, the learning dynamics of skill compositions and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xingyu Zhao , Darsh Sharma , Rheeya Uppaal , Yiqiao Zhong

The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Paul Michel

Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Weiwei Sun , Guoliang Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Chong Meng , Zhicong Cheng , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

Fine-tuning LLMs on benign data can still degrade alignment and adversarial robustness, yet direct analysis of the role of fine-tuning objectives in shaping these safety outcomes remain limited. We present a controlled comparison of six…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Daniel Vennemeyer , Punya Syon Pandey , Phan Anh Duong , Michael Umeokoli , Samuel Ratnam

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on benign narrow data can sometimes induce broad harmful behaviors, a vulnerability termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work links these failures to specific directions in the activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Krishak Aneja , Manas Mittal , Anmol Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru , Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri

Fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is a common strategy to improve performance following an ad-hoc data collection and annotation of real-world scenes. However, this process is often prone to biases, errors, and distribution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Massimo Rizzoli , Simone Alghisi , Seyed Mahed Mousavi , Giuseppe Riccardi

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Kiran Ramnath , Xiang-Bo Mao , Regunathan Radhakrishnan , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Dongyue Li , Ziniu Zhang , Lu Wang , Hongyang R. Zhang

In this paper, we move towards combining large parametric models with non-parametric prototypical networks. We propose prototypical fine-tuning, a novel prototypical framework for fine-tuning pretrained language models (LM), which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Yiqiao Jin , Xiting Wang , Yaru Hao , Yizhou Sun , Xing Xie

Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the failure to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, leading to behaviors that diverge from human expectations in real-world settings where these dimensions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Usman Naseem , Gautam Siddharth Kashyap , Ebad Shabbir , Sushant Kumar Ray , Abdullah Mohammad , Rafiq Ali

Despite the success, the process of fine-tuning large-scale PLMs brings prohibitive adaptation costs. In fact, fine-tuning all the parameters of a colossal model and retaining separate instances for different tasks are practically…

Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge and remarkable abilities from extensive text corpora, making them powerful tools for various applications. To make LLMs more usable, aligning them with human preferences is essential.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Mozhi Zhang , Pengyu Wang , Chenkun Tan , Mianqiu Huang , Dong Zhang , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Thom Lake , Eunsol Choi , Greg Durrett

This paper explores a scientific question in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): why SFT is broadly effective for small-scale deep neural networks, yet can produce inconsistent or even detrimental effects when applied to large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Junpeng Zhang , Lei Cheng , Guoxi Zhang , Hua Cai , Qing Xu , Quanshi Zhang

In the era of large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning pretrained models has become ubiquitous. Yet the theoretical underpinning remains an open question. A central question is why only a few epochs of fine-tuning are typically sufficient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Zexuan Sun , Garvesh Raskutti

As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems. Therefore, studying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Mehar Bhatia , Shravan Nayak , Gaurav Kamath , Marius Mosbach , Karolina Stańczak , Vered Shwartz , Siva Reddy

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance and surprising emergent properties. However, their effectiveness remains limited by the fixed context window of the transformer architecture, posing challenges for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Tianqi Du , Haotian Huang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-following corpus is a crucial approach toward the alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, the performance of LLMs on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks tends to suffer from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Tingchen Fu , Deng Cai , Lemao Liu , Shuming Shi , Rui Yan