Related papers: Mapping Post-Training Forgetting in Language Model…
Pretrained language models are remarkably effective in aligning with human brain responses elicited by natural language stimuli, positioning them as promising model organisms for studying language processing in the brain. However, existing…
Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…
Post-training has greatly improved reasoning in frontier vision-language models, yet its gains for perception remain comparatively limited, creating a bottleneck for end-to-end visual reasoning. To investigate this gap, we introduce a…
In general class-incremental learning, researchers typically use sample sets as a tool to avoid catastrophic forgetting during continuous learning. At the same time, researchers have also noted the differences between class-incremental…
Reinforcement post training (RPT) has recently shown promise in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, it remains unclear how well these improvements generalize to new domains, as prior work evaluates…
Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…
Modern language models are powerful, but typically static after deployment. A major obstacle to building models that continually learn over time is catastrophic forgetting, where updating on new data erases previously acquired capabilities.…
This study investigates the mechanisms and factors influencing memorization in fine-tuned large language models (LLMs), with a focus on the medical domain due to its privacy-sensitive nature. We examine how different aspects of the…
Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…
Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…
Frontier AI systems are making transformative impacts across society, but such benefits are not without costs: models trained on web-scale datasets containing personal and private data raise profound concerns about data privacy and…
Scaling model size, training data, and compute power have driven advances in large language models (LLMs), but these approaches are reaching saturation as human-generated text is exhausted and further gains diminish. We propose experience…
Large pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this…
The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…
Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact be favorable to learning. We introduce "forget-and-relearn" as a powerful paradigm for shaping the…
In this work, we study how the finetuning stage in the pretrain-finetune framework changes the behavior of a pretrained neural language generator. We focus on the transformer encoder-decoder model for the open-domain dialogue response…
Human beings primarily understand the world through concepts (e.g., dog), abstract mental representations that structure perception, reasoning, and learning. However, how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and forget such…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…
Optimal configuration of the learning rate (LR) is a fundamental yet formidable challenge in large-scale pre-training. Given the stringent trade-off between training costs and model performance, the pivotal question is whether the optimal…