Related papers: Iterative Finetuning is Mostly Idempotent

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a common method for fine-tuning large language models, where a base model can serve multiple users through PEFT module switching. To enhance user experience, base models require periodic…

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

As development of large language models (LLM) progresses, aligning them with human preferences has become increasingly important. We propose stepwise DPO (sDPO), an extension of the recently popularized direct preference optimization (DPO)…

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized, privacy-preserving model training but struggles to balance global generalization and local personalization due to non-identical data distributions across clients. Personalized Fine-Tuning…

We study the phenomenon of bias amplification in classifiers, wherein a machine learning model learns to predict classes with a greater disparity than the underlying ground truth. We demonstrate that bias amplification can arise via an…

Real-world model deployments demand strong performance on narrow domains where data is often scarce. Typically, practitioners finetune models to specialize them, but this risks overfitting to the domain and forgetting general knowledge. We…

Deep generative models have made tremendous progress in modeling complex data, often exhibiting generation quality that surpasses a typical human's ability to discern the authenticity of samples. Undeniably, a key driver of this success is…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) has been a go-to and effective method for enhancing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in relatively small LLMs by fine-tuning them with long CoT responses from larger LLMs. To continually improve reasoning…

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits broad capabilities, yet, for specific tasks or domains their attainment of higher accuracy and more reliable reasoning generally depends on post-training through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Recent research suggests that predictions made by machine-learning models can amplify biases present in the training data. When a model amplifies bias, it makes certain predictions at a higher rate for some groups than expected based on…

Finetuning-free personalized image generation can synthesize customized images without test-time finetuning, attracting wide research interest owing to its high efficiency. Current finetuning-free methods simply adopt a single training…

The development of large language models leads to the formation of a pre-train-then-align paradigm, in which the model is typically pre-trained on a large text corpus and undergoes a tuning stage to align the model with human preference or…

Pretrained models from self-supervision are prevalently used in fine-tuning downstream tasks faster or for better accuracy. However, gaining robustness from pretraining is left unexplored. We introduce adversarial training into…

Large language models often exhibit increased sycophantic behavior after preference-based post-training, showing a stronger tendency to affirm a user's stated or implied belief even when this conflicts with factual accuracy or sound…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely used after supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align language models, yet empirical behavior under small backbones and modest data is under-specified. We systematically compare SFT-only, DPO-only,…

Pre-trained representation is one of the key elements in the success of modern deep learning. However, existing works on continual learning methods have mostly focused on learning models incrementally from scratch. In this paper, we explore…

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of…