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When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Tuning large language models is essential for optimizing their performance across diverse applications, particularly in scenarios with limited data availability. Tuning large language models in scarce data scenarios is crucial, particularly…

This work aims to understand how scaling improves language models, specifically in terms of training dynamics. We find that language models undergo loss deceleration early in training; an abrupt slowdown in the rate of loss improvement,…

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…

Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs), such as GPT4-V and LLaVA, have been substantial. LLaVA's modular architecture, in particular, offers a blend of simplicity and efficiency. Recent works mainly focus on introducing…

We study adaptive learning rate scheduling for norm-constrained optimizers (e.g., Muon and Lion). We introduce a generalized smoothness assumption under which local curvature decreases with the suboptimality gap and empirically verify that…

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) require post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-response pairs to enable instruction following. However, this process can potentially harm existing capabilities…

Self-supervised pre-training of large-scale transformer models on text corpora followed by finetuning has achieved state-of-the-art on a number of natural language processing tasks. Recently, Lu et al. (2021, arXiv:2103.05247) claimed that…

Instruction fine-tuning has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific applications. However, recent studies have highlighted significant security vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs. Existing…

While critical for alignment, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) incurs the risk of catastrophic forgetting, yet the layer-wise emergence of instruction-following capabilities remains elusive. We investigate this mechanism via a comprehensive…

Transferring the optimal learning rate from small to large neural networks can enable efficient training at scales where hyperparameter tuning is otherwise prohibitively expensive. To this end, the Maximal Update Parameterization (muP)…

Learning rate warm-up - increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training - has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we provide a principled…

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate functionally correct solutions but often fall short in code efficiency, a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce a novel test-time iterative optimization framework to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Unconstrained fine-tuning of flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models drives dense parameter overwrites, degrading pre-trained capabilities. We present Conservative Supervised Fine-Tuning (ConSFT), an optimization objective that…

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in complex tasks, yet their widespread adoption is impeded by substantial computational demands. With hundreds of billion parameters, transformer-based LLMs necessitate months of…

Pretrained language models have been shown to exhibit biases and social stereotypes. Prior work on debiasing these models has largely focused on modifying embedding spaces during pretraining, which is not scalable for large models.…

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…