Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting pretrained language models to downstream domains, yet it often improves target-domain behavior at the cost of degrading pre-existing capabilities. Standard cross-entropy fine-tuning promotes only the observed label token and leaves unconstrained how probability mass is redistributed over other plausible alternatives, potentially distorting the rich local preference structure learned during pretraining.
arXiv:2606. 09396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL.
By Ke Wang, Shuangqi Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Pascal Frossard
arXiv:2604. 26170v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Adapting large language models (LLMs) to a targeted task efficiently and effectively remains a fundamental challenge.
By Ting-Wei Li, Sirui Chen, Jiaru Zou, Yingbing Huang, Tianxin Wei, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv:2606. 11189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) typically maximizes the likelihood of every token in a demonstrated trajectory.
By Tong Xie, Yuanhao Ban, Yunqi Hong, Sohyun An, Yihang Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2604. 03532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show strong multilingual capabilities, yet reliably controlling the language of their outputs remains difficult.
By Sing Hieng Wong, Hassan Sajjad, A. B. Siddique
arXiv:2607. 08839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference.
By Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Srijan Das, Yuki Mistufuji
arXiv:2505.19893v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language model pretraining is compute-intensive, yet many tokens contribute marginally to learning, resulting in inefficiency. We introduce E...
By Melis Ilayda Bal, Volkan Cevher, Michael Muehlebach
arXiv:2603. 07523v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transferring knowledge by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained networks has become a standard paradigm for downstream tasks, yet the knowledge of a pre-trained model is tightly coupled with monolithic architecture, which restricts flexible reuse across models of varying scales.
By Jianlu Shen, Fu Feng, Yucheng Xie, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng
arXiv:2510. 16882v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks.
By Heming Zou, Yixiu Mao, Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Xiangyang Ji
The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.
By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
arXiv:2609.37076v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models trained on vast corpora inherently risk memorizing harmful content that may later re-emerge in their outputs. To mitigate this is...
By Puning Yang, Qizhou Wang, Junchi Yu, Bo Han, Xiuying Chen
arXiv:2606. 05173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked language modelling (MLM) has been the dominant pre-training objective for text encoders since BERT, yet it encourages representations that are strongly anchored to surface-form token identity rather than deeper semantic structure.
By Aimen Boukhari