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Related papers: Alignment Dynamics in LLM Fine-Tuning

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Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Weiwei Sun , Guoliang Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Chong Meng , Zhicong Cheng , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

"LLM-as-a-judge," which utilizes large language models (LLMs) as evaluators, has proven effective in many evaluation tasks. However, evaluator LLMs exhibit numerical bias, a phenomenon where certain evaluation scores are generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ayako Sato , Hwichan Kim , Zhousi Chen , Masato Mita , Mamoru Komachi

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose critical safety challenges, as they are susceptible not only to adversarial attacks such as jailbreaking but also to inadvertently generating harmful content for benign users. While internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ming Wen , Kun Yang , Xin Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Dingding Han , Shiwen Cui , Yuedong Xu

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Anirudh Sundar , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Barry-John Theobald , Skyler Seto , Masha Fedzechkina

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Kaiser Sun , Mark Dredze

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiao Wang , Yifei Zhang , YongKang Liu , Xiaocui Yang , Zihan Wang , Shi Feng , Daling Wang

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Yikun Wang , Rui Zheng , Liang Ding , Qi Zhang , Dahua Lin , Dacheng Tao

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiaomin Yu , Yi Xin , Yuhui Zhang , Wenjie Zhang , Chonghan Liu , Hanzhen Zhao , Chen Liu , Xiaoxing Hu , Ziyue Qiao , Hao Tang , Xiaobin Hu , Chengwei Qin , Hui Xiong , Yu Qiao , Shuicheng Yan

Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) often creates a systematic discrepancy between a model's aligned output and the underlying pre-aligned data distribution. We propose a framework in which the effect of safety alignment on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuxuan Lu , Yongkang Guo , Yuqing Kong

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkably powerful capabilities. One of the crucial factors to achieve success is aligning the LLM's output with human preferences. This alignment process often requires only a small amount of data to…

Emergent Misalignment refers to a failure mode in which fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly scoped data induces broadly misaligned behavior. Prior explanations mainly attribute this phenomenon to the generalization of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yanghao Su , Wenbo Zhou , Tianwei Zhang , Qiu Han , Weiming Zhang , Nenghai Yu , Jie Zhang

Providing high-quality feedback to Large Language Models (LLMs) on a diverse training distribution can be difficult and expensive, and providing feedback only on a narrow distribution can result in unintended generalizations. To better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Constanza Fierro , Fabien Roger

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with numerical regression under long-tailed target distributions. Token-level supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and point-wise regression rewards bias learning toward high-density regions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yao Du , Shanshan Song , Xiaomeng Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are regularly updated to enhance performance, typically through changes in data or architecture. Within the update process, developers often prioritize improving overall performance metrics, paying less…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Jessica Echterhoff , Fartash Faghri , Raviteja Vemulapalli , Ting-Yao Hu , Chun-Liang Li , Oncel Tuzel , Hadi Pouransari

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Lifelong multimodal agents must continuously adapt to new tasks through post-training, but this creates a fundamental tension between acquiring capabilities and preserving safety alignment. We demonstrate that fine-tuning aligned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Idhant Gulati , Shivam Raval

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma