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Deep learning models are known to overfit and memorize spurious features in the training dataset. While numerous empirical studies have aimed at understanding this phenomenon, a rigorous theoretical framework to quantify it is still…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-20 Simone Bombari , Marco Mondelli

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Katie Kang , Amrith Setlur , Dibya Ghosh , Jacob Steinhardt , Claire Tomlin , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

Commonsense reasoning benchmarks have been largely solved by fine-tuning language models. The downside is that fine-tuning may cause models to overfit to task-specific data and thereby forget their knowledge gained during pre-training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Kaixin Ma , Filip Ilievski , Jonathan Francis , Satoru Ozaki , Eric Nyberg , Alessandro Oltramari

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has emerged as a highly successful approach, with training only a small number of parameters without sacrificing performance and becoming the de-facto learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Baohao Liao , Shaomu Tan , Christof Monz

Instruction Fine-tuning~(IFT) is a critical phase in building large language models~(LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Mengjie Ren , Boxi Cao , Hongyu Lin , Cao Liu , Xianpei Han , Ke Zeng , Guanglu Wan , Xunliang Cai , Le Sun

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Bingwen Wei , Xinlei Chen , Qingmin Liao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Latent reasoning offers a computation-efficient alternative to Chain-of-Thought but often suffers from performance degradation due to distributional misalignment and ambiguous chain definitions. Ideally, latent reasoning should function as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingcheng Deng , Liang Pang , Zihao Wei , Shicheng Xu , Zenghao Duan , Kun Xu , Yang Song , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

This article focuses on large language models (LLMs) fine-tuning in the scarce data regime (also known as the "few-shot" learning setting). We propose a method to increase the generalization capabilities of LLMs based on neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Louis Falissard , Vincent Guigue , Laure Soulier

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial not only for unlocking their potential in specific tasks but also for ensuring that responses meet human expectations and adhere to safety and ethical principles. Current alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Ruijun Chen , Jiehao Liang , Shiping Gao , Fanqi Wan , Xiaojun Quan

Packing for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in autoregressive models involves concatenating data points of varying lengths until reaching the designed maximum length to facilitate GPU processing. However, randomly concatenating data points can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Jiancheng Dong , Lei Jiang , Wei Jin , Lu Cheng

Foundation models encode rich representations that can be adapted to downstream tasks by fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning a model on one data distribution often degrades performance under distribution shifts. Current approaches to robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Caroline Choi , Yoonho Lee , Annie Chen , Allan Zhou , Aditi Raghunathan , Chelsea Finn

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Siyuan Liu , Tinghong Chen , Xinghan Li , Yifei Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to specialize in downstream tasks, with the Cross Entropy (CE) loss being the de facto choice. However, CE maximizes the likelihood of observed data without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tian Xu , Zeyu Qin , Jiancong Xiao , Zhi-Quan Luo , Ruoyu Sun

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) advance generalization and data efficiency in time series forecasting by unified large-scale pretraining. But TSFMs remain lacking when adapting to specific downstream forecasting tasks for two reasons.…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-04 Siyang Li , Yize Chen , Zijie Zhu , Yuxin Pan , Yan Guo , Ming Huang , Hui Xiong

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Huan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Qihua Dong , Yitian Zhang , Yun Fu

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Siyuan Lu , Zechuan Wang , Hongxuan Zhang , Qintong Wu , Leilei Gan , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu , Tao Lin

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Fine-tuning is a widespread technique that allows practitioners to transfer pre-trained capabilities, as recently showcased by the successful applications of foundation models. However, fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models remains…