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

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) reveal a perplexing phenomenon in continual learning: despite extensive training, models experience significant performance declines, raising questions about task alignment and underlying…

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce…

Large language models (LLMs) encode extensive world knowledge through pre-training on massive datasets, which can then be fine-tuned for the question-answering (QA) task. However, effective strategies for fine-tuning LLMs for the QA task…

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…

We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…

Muon optimizer has demonstrated robust results in pretraining of language models but its performance in finetuning of existing public pretrained models is not yet explored. Currently, Muon is used along with AdamW introducing a scope of…

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…

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired…

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…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…

Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling…

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) store vast amounts of knowledge, which often requires updates to correct factual errors, incorporate newly acquired information, or adapt model behavior. Model editing methods have emerged as efficient solutions…

The recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been accompanied by an effervescence of novel ideas and methods to better optimize the loss of deep learning models. Claims from those methods are myriad: from faster convergence to…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order optimization (ZO) offers a memory-efficient alternative to gradient-based methods but suffers from slower convergence and unstable optimization due to noisy gradient estimates.…

Pre-trained neural language models bring significant improvement for various NLP tasks, by fine-tuning the models on task-specific training sets. During fine-tuning, the parameters are initialized from pre-trained models directly, which…