Related papers: Optimizer-Model Consistency: Full Finetuning with …

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have…

Continual learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs) is an evolving domain that focuses on developing efficient and sustainable training strategies to adapt models to emerging knowledge and achieve robustness in dynamic environments. Our…

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…

We consider small-data, large-scale decision problems in which a firm must make many operational decisions simultaneously (e.g., across a large product portfolio) while observing only a few, potentially noisy, data points per instance.…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In…

Training large language models (LLMs) relies on adaptive optimizers such as Adam, which introduce extra operations and require significantly more memory to maintain first- and second-order moments than SGD. While recent works such as…

We present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study of the Muon optimizer for training transformers only with a small to medium decoder (30M - 200M parameters), with an emphasis on its mathematical foundations, convergence properties…

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of…

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses privacy and security risks, as models may unintentionally reproduce sensitive or copyrighted data. Existing analyses focus on average-case scenarios, often neglecting the highly skewed…

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are general purpose problem solvers applicable to a diverse set of tasks with prompts. They can be further improved towards a specific task by fine-tuning on a specialized dataset. However,…

Matrix-based preconditioned optimizers, such as Muon, have recently been shown to be more efficient than scalar-based optimizers for training large-scale neural networks, including large language models (LLMs). Recent benchmark studies of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…