arXiv Machine Learning

TALAN: Task-Aligned Latent Adaptation Networks for Targeted Post-Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 06902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Targeted post-training aims to improve reasoning, math, and code without degrading strengths.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Activation Boundary Matching: Task-Informed Initialization for Low-Rank Adaptation

The paper introduces Activation Boundary Matching for Low‑Rank Adaptation (ABM‑LoRA), a task‑informed initialization strategy that uses the signs of layer‑wise pre‑activations from a brief probe adapter as targets for a fresh adapter. By training with a margin‑based hinge objective on these activation boundaries, ABM‑LoRA captures useful adaptation directions that standard LoRA initializers miss, while requiring only a few forward passes. Experiments show that ABM‑LoRA outperforms or matches existing LoRA, SVD, and gradient‑based initializers across multiple models and benchmarks, including T5‑base/GLUE, ConvNeXt‑T, Swin‑T, Qwen2.5‑1.5B, and LLaMA2‑7B.

By Dongha Lee, Jinhee Park, Minjun Kim, Junseok Kwon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Osprey: Target-agnostic Pre-training Makes Stronger Drafters in Speculative Decoding

Osprey is a target‑agnostic pre‑training method that bootstraps draft models for speculative decoding from existing small language models. By pruning to a shallow backbone, restoring language‑modeling capability with next‑token pretraining, and adapting via vocabulary alignment and distillation, Osprey reduces per‑target work to a lightweight adaptation step. Experiments show that a single Osprey backbone improves mean acceptance length by up to 22.7% and increases tokens per second by 17.5% across several large target models, especially on out‑of‑domain and multilingual data.

By Fengxiang Bie, Yuqing Jian, Yifan Yu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ChainDoRA: Tensor-Train Factorized Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

ChainDoRA is a new parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for large language models that replaces the dense low‑rank factorization of LoRA with a connected Tensor‑Train (TT) chain. By separating weight magnitude and direction and using a TT rank to control representation capacity, ChainDoRA achieves higher average accuracy on seven commonsense reasoning benchmarks while dramatically reducing trainable parameters—down to 5.35 M versus 56 M for LoRA and DoRA. Ablation studies show that the TT parameterization offers controllable trade‑offs between parameter cost and accuracy.

By Ashfak Yeafi, Mehedi Hasan, Md Khairul Islam
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

New LoRA Skills Should Read but Never Write

The paper introduces READ, a method for composing low‑rank adapters (LoRA) in large language models. By rewriting each adapter into a balanced canonical form and enforcing a one‑directional coupling, READ allows new skills to read but never write into the output subspaces of existing skills, eliminating interference. Experiments on four benchmark suites and two model families show that READ consistently outperforms existing baselines, improving SuperGLUE scores by over twenty points and domain suite scores by more than seven points.

By Zeyan Li, Panqi Yang, Qirong Guo, Shengda Zhuo, SIyuan Qiu, Hu Xu, Chun Li, Jianfeng Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Selective State-Space Adaptation and Retrieval for Language Model Reasoning

The paper introduces a family of adapters that enhance language model reasoning by adding selective state-space control at token and context levels. The token-level MaLoRA makes the adapter’s scaling factor dynamic and recurrent, improving over static low‑rank adaptation. The context-level MaRA tracks cross‑segment reasoning state and retrieves relevant segments, outperforming an eight‑billion‑parameter dense retriever and boosting reasoning accuracy by an average of +6.4 F1 over LoRA.

By Atahan Dokme, Larry Heck
Hugging Face Trending Papers
6d ago

Learn Here, Move Less Elsewhere: Input-Conditioned Plasticity from Retained-Domain Activation Atlases

The paper introduces ATLAS, a method that uses retained-domain activation atlases to guide task-specific fine‑tuning of language models. By providing local reference centers and directional filters, ATLAS learns a low‑rank residual that adapts to new tasks while preserving existing behavior. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B and other backbones show lower retained‑output KL divergence, fewer rewritten answers, and more stable responses compared to seven baselines.