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Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on domain-specific data is the dominant approach for adapting foundation models to specialized tasks. However, it has been observed that SFT models tend to forget knowledge acquired during pretraining. In vision…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective…

Catastrophic forgetting describes the fact that machine learning models will likely forget the knowledge of previously learned tasks after the learning process of a new one. It is a vital problem in the continual learning scenario and…

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Neural machine translation (NMT) models usually suffer from catastrophic forgetting during continual training where the models tend to gradually forget previously learned knowledge and swing to fit the newly added data which may have a…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, even stronger LLMs are susceptible to acquiring erroneous or obsolete information from the…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable empirical success through scaling model and data size, pretraining has become increasingly critical yet computationally prohibitive, hindering rapid development. Despite the availability of…

Autonomous machine learning systems that learn many tasks in sequence are prone to the catastrophic forgetting problem. Mathematical theory is needed in order to understand the extent of forgetting during continual learning. As a…

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Self-supervised pretraining has been extensively studied in language and vision domains, where a unified model can be easily adapted to various downstream tasks by pretraining representations without explicit labels. When it comes to…

Language models (LMs) are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to specialize their capabilities for downstream tasks. However, in typical scenarios where the fine-tuning data is limited, e.g., compared to pre-training, SFT can…

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…