Related papers: (How) Learning Rates Regulate Catastrophic Overtra…

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Pre-training on a source task is usually expected to facilitate fine-tuning on similar downstream problems. In this work, we mathematically show that this naive intuition is not always true: excessive pre-training can computationally slow…

A large obstacle to deploying deep learning models in practice is the process of updating models post-deployment (ideally, frequently). Deep neural networks can cost many thousands of dollars to train. When new data comes in the pipeline,…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single…

Current training regimes for deep learning usually involve exposure to a single task / dataset at a time. Here we start from the observation that in this context the trained model is not given any knowledge of anything outside its…

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

The pretrain-finetune paradigm usually improves downstream performance over training a model from scratch on the same task, becoming commonplace across many areas of machine learning. While pretraining is empirically observed to be…

Supervised and preference-based fine-tuning techniques have become popular for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user intent and correctness criteria. However, real-world training data often exhibits spurious correlations --…

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…

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…

Fine-tuning is arguably the most straightforward way to tailor a pre-trained model (e.g., a foundation model) to downstream applications, but it also comes with the risk of losing valuable knowledge the model had learned in pre-training.…

A common challenge towards the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn new languages over time without hampering the model's performance on languages in which the model is already proficient (usually English).…

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning: after learning new tasks sequentially, they perform worse on earlier tasks. Existing methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by data replay,…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…

When finetuning large language models for specialized tasks such as mathematical reasoning, models exhibit catastrophic forgetting, losing previously learned capabilities. We investigate this by finetuning Flan-T5-Base (250M parameters) on…

Pre-trained foundation models, due to their enormous capacity and exposure to vast amounts of data during pre-training, are known to have learned plenty of real-world concepts. An important step in making these pre-trained models effective…

Continual instruction tuning(CIT) during the post-training phase is crucial for adapting multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to evolving real-world demands. However, the progress is hampered by the lack of benchmarks with rigorous,…