Related papers: Beyond Log Likelihood: Probability-Based Objective…
Existing pre-trained models are generally geared towards a particular class of problems. To date, there seems to be still no consensus on what the right architecture and pre-training setup should be. This paper presents a unified framework…
Understanding how language model capabilities transfer from pretraining to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to efficient model development and data curation. In this work, we investigate four core questions: RQ1. To what extent…
Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters continue to underperform on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, often trailing smaller models like BERT-base on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE.…
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…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better…
Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…
In-context learning (ICL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are two common strategies for improving the performance of modern large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. Despite their different natures, these strategies often lead to…
Optimizing data mixtures for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing general-purpose models, yet this area remains underexplored. In this paper, we frame data mixing as an optimization problem…
Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a…
Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks significantly, but finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets poses significant challenges such as instability and overfitting. Previous methods tackle…
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language modeling, recent studies reveal that they often fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples due to spurious correlations acquired during pre-training.…
Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…
Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…
In recent years, pre-trained large language models have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks. Besides the pivotal role of self-supervised pre-training, their effectiveness in downstream applications also depends critically on…
Large Language Models (LLMs), when used in educational settings without pedagogical fine-tuning, often provide immediate answers rather than guiding students through the problem-solving process. This approach falls short of pedagogically…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet their potential for sequential decision-making remains underexplored. In this paper, we study the ICL capabilities of LLMs in sequential…
Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is increasingly impractical, making post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning (RL-FT, e.g., PPO) central to modern practice. Using an…
Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive…
Consistently scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) imposes substantial burdens on model adaptation, necessitating more efficient alternatives to conventional fine-tuning. Given the advantage of prompting in the zero-shot setting and…