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Modern large language model (LLM) alignment techniques rely on human feedback, but it is unclear whether these techniques fundamentally limit the capabilities of aligned LLMs. In particular, it is unknown if it is possible to align…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in various real-world scenarios due to their excellent generalization capabilities and robust generative abilities. However, they exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Yijiong Yu , Huiqiang Jiang , Xufang Luo , Qianhui Wu , Chin-Yew Lin , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang , Yongfeng Huang , Lili Qiu

Finetuning large pretrained neural networks is known to be resource-intensive, both in terms of memory and computational cost. To mitigate this, a common approach is to restrict training to a subset of the model parameters. By analyzing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chao Zhou , Tom Jacobs , Advait Gadhikar , Rebekka Burkholz

Large Language Models (LLMs), with billions of parameters, present significant challenges for full finetuning due to the high computational demands, memory requirements, and impracticality of many real-world applications. When faced with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jonathan Svirsky , Yehonathan Refael , Ofir Lindenbaum

Interventions in language models (LMs) are applied strategically to steer model behavior during the forward pass. Learnable interventions, also known as representation fine-tuning, aim to apply pointwise control within the concept subspace…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Chunyuan Deng , Ruidi Chang , Hanjie Chen

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

Large language models (LLMs) consistently benefit from further fine-tuning on various tasks. However, we observe that directly tuning the Instruct (i.e., instruction-tuned) models often leads to marginal improvements and even performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Taiqiang Wu , Runming Yang , Jiayi Li , Pengfei Hu , Yik-Chung Wu , Ngai Wong , Yujiu Yang

Although prior work on bias mitigation has focused on promoting social equality and demographic parity, less attention has been given to aligning LLM's outputs to desired distributions. For example, we might want to align a model with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Ingroj Shrestha , Padmini Srinivasan

Prevailing alignment methods induce opaque parameter changes, obscuring what models truly learn. To address this, we introduce Feature Steering with Reinforcement Learning (FSRL), a framework that trains a lightweight adapter to steer model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jeremias Ferrao , Matthijs van der Lende , Ilija Lichkovski , Clement Neo

Magnitude pruning is a widely used strategy for reducing model size in pure supervised learning; however, it is less effective in the transfer learning regime that has become standard for state-of-the-art natural language processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Victor Sanh , Thomas Wolf , Alexander M. Rush

We study the problem of transfer learning and fine-tuning in linear models for both regression and binary classification. In particular, we consider the use of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a linear model initialized with pretrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Reza Ghane , Danil Akhtiamov , Babak Hassibi

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and related fields. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains computationally expensive and risks degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Prakash Bhat

Changing how pre-trained models behave -- e.g., improving their performance on a downstream task or mitigating biases learned during pre-training -- is a common practice when developing machine learning systems. In this work, we propose a…

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on learning how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Nishant Subramani , Nivedita Suresh , Matthew E. Peters

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged…

Cross-entropy pretraining and preference alignment update the same transformer weights, but leave geometrically distinct traces. We characterise this asymmetry with a relative-subspace-fraction probe that tracks how weight deltas align with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Valeria Ruscio , Eli-Shaoul Khedouri , Keiran Thompson

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs significant cost; hence, any strategy that accelerates model convergence is helpful. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a simple idea checkpoint averaging along the trajectory of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Sunny Sanyal , Atula Neerkaje , Jean Kaddour , Abhishek Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi

Large pre-trained, zero-shot capable models have shown considerable success both for standard transfer and adaptation tasks, with particular robustness towards distribution shifts. In addition, subsequent fine-tuning can considerably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Zafir Stojanovski , Karsten Roth , Zeynep Akata

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang