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High-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data are crucial for eliciting strong capabilities from pretrained large language models (LLMs). Typically, instructions are paired with multiple responses sampled from other LLMs, which are often…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in critical decision-making systems, the lack of reliable methods to measure their uncertainty presents a fundamental trustworthiness risk. We introduce a normalized confidence score…

We show that the task of question answering (QA) can significantly benefit from the transfer learning of models trained on a different large, fine-grained QA dataset. We achieve the state of the art in two well-studied QA datasets, WikiQA…

State-of-the-art performance on language understanding tasks is now achieved with increasingly large networks; the current record holder has billions of parameters. Given a language model pre-trained on massive unlabeled text corpora, only…

Pre-training and fine-tuning is a paradigm for alleviating the data scarcity problem in end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST). The commonplace "modality gap" between speech and text data often leads to inconsistent inputs between…

Prompt tuning (PT) is a promising parameter-efficient method to utilize extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs), which can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by only tuning a few soft prompts. However,…

We study linear regression under covariate shift, where the marginal distribution over the input covariates differs in the source and the target domains, while the conditional distribution of the output given the input covariates is similar…

As the knowledge of large language models (LLMs) becomes outdated over time, there is a growing need for efficient methods to update them, especially when injecting proprietary information. Our study reveals that comprehension-intensive…

Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved great success in the natural language process field. The standard paradigm of exploiting them includes two steps: first, pre-training a model, e.g. BERT, with a large scale unlabeled monolingual…

In self-supervised learning, one trains a model to solve a so-called pretext task on a dataset without the need for human annotation. The main objective, however, is to transfer this model to a target domain and task. Currently, the most…

Large language models have the potential to generate explanations for their own predictions in a variety of styles based on user instructions. Recent research has examined whether these self-explanations faithfully reflect the models'…

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, we identify a critical trade-off: while unconstrained RFT achieves strong reasoning performance, it…

Recently, significant improvements have been achieved in various natural language processing tasks using neural sequence-to-sequence models. While aiming for the best generation quality is important, ultimately it is also necessary to…

We present a controlled study of how dataset contamination interacts with the post-training stages now standard in large language model training pipelines. Starting from clean checkpoints of Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B) and Gemma3 (1B/4B), we inject…

Training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning via maths and code datasets has become a major new focus in LLM post-training. Two particularly popular approaches are reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but…

A widespread strategy to obtain a language model that performs well on a target domain is to finetune a pretrained model to perform unsupervised next-token prediction on data from that target domain. Finetuning presents two challenges: (i)…

Finetuning provides a scalable and cost-effective means of customizing language models for specific tasks or response styles, with greater reliability than prompting or in-context learning. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is that…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become the de facto training paradigm of large models, where pre-training is followed by supervised fine-tuning using domain-specific data and labels. Despite demonstrating comparable performance with…

Pre-trained multilingual language models show significant performance gains for zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer on a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Previously, for zero-shot cross-lingual evaluation,…

Post-training (via supervised fine-tuning) improves instruction-following, but often induces semantic mode collapse by biasing models toward low-entropy fine-tuning data at the expense of the high-entropy pretraining distribution.…