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In data-rich domains such as vision, language, and speech, deep learning prevails to deliver high-performance task-specific models and can even learn general task-agnostic representations for efficient finetuning to downstream tasks.…

The pretrain-finetune paradigm has shown outstanding performance on many applications of deep learning, where a model is pre-trained on a upstream large dataset (e.g. ImageNet), and is then fine-tuned to different downstream tasks. Though…

A recent trend in deep learning algorithms has been towards training large scale models, having high parameter count and trained on big dataset. However, robustness of such large scale models towards real-world settings is still a…

The advent of transformer-based architectures and large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Since these LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data from the web and…

Existing works have shown that fine-tuned textual transformer models achieve state-of-the-art prediction performances but are also vulnerable to adversarial text perturbations. Traditional adversarial evaluation is often done \textit{only…

Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems. In practice, feature learning plays an important role across both stages: deep neural networks learn a broad range of useful features during pretraining and…

Language model pretraining involves training on extensive corpora, where data quality plays a pivotal role. In this work, we aim to directly estimate the contribution of data during pretraining and select pretraining data in an efficient…

Machine unlearning algorithms are increasingly important as legal concerns arise around the provenance of training data, but verifying the success of unlearning is often difficult. Provable guarantees for unlearning are often limited to…

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve…

Fine-tuning pre-trained generative language models to down-stream language generation tasks has shown promising results. However, this comes with the cost of having a single, large model for each task, which is not ideal in low-memory/power…

When adapting large language models (LLMs) to a specific downstream task, two primary approaches are commonly employed: (1) prompt engineering, often with in-context few-shot learning, leveraging the model's inherent generalization…

Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, and several recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase…

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained code models such as CodeBERT on downstream tasks has achieved great success in many software testing and analysis tasks. While effective and prevalent, fine-tuning the pre-trained parameters incurs a large…

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

Although the pre-training followed by fine-tuning paradigm is used extensively in many fields, there is still some controversy surrounding the impact of pre-training on the fine-tuning process. Currently, experimental findings based on text…

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on…

Post-training (via supervised fine-tuning) improves instruction-following, but often induces semantic mode collapse by biasing models toward low-entropy fine-tuning data at the expense of the high-entropy pretraining distribution.…

Recent studies applied Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning techniques (PEFTs) to efficiently narrow the performance gap between pre-training and downstream. There are two important factors for various PEFTs, namely, the accessible data size and…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks has become common practice in natural language processing. However, most of the PLMs are vulnerable, e.g., they are brittle under adversarial attacks or imbalanced data,…