The paper introduces Poodle, a prototype for just‑in‑time model replacement (JITR) that automatically swaps a large language model with a cheaper, task‑specific model when a recurring task is detected. Poodle reduces inference time by up to 7.5× and saves over $2,200 per 1 M requests compared to a flagship hosted LLM, while maintaining competitive accuracy. The authors argue that model search and transfer learning are essential for efficiently identifying and fine‑tuning these custom models.
By Nils Strassenburg, Boris Glavic, Tilmann Rabl
arXiv:2602. 12323v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The widespread availability of fine-tuned LoRA modules for open pre-trained models has led to an interest in methods that can adaptively merge LoRAs to improve performance.
By Haokun Liu, Gyung Hyun Je, Marco Ciccone, Zhenlin Xu, Prasanth YSS, Colin Raffel
UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations.
"whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."
By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang
arXiv:2602. 05988v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on web-scale datasets becomes fundamental for advancing general-purpose AI.
By Keith Ando Ogawa, Bruno Lopes Yamamoto, Lucas Lauton de Alcantara, Lucas Pellicer, Rosimeire Pereira Costa, Edson Bollis, Anna Helena Reali Costa, Artur Jordao
The paper introduces FedTAR, a task-aware federated fine‑tuning approach for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. FedTAR links local client updates to task preferences using routing outputs and Singular Value Decomposition to extract low‑dimensional task coordinates and update directions. It then aggregates updates within and across task clusters, reconstructing the final update to preserve expert specialization and reduce interference, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on four benchmark tasks under non‑IID settings.
By Tingqi Wang, Hongyu Ke, Haoxin Wang, Rafal Angryk, Zhipeng Cai
The study evaluates whether a single large language model (LLM) can handle multiple customer‑support tasks or if separate specialist models are preferable. Using 13 models from five families and 200+ checkpoints across eight datasets, the authors find that multi‑task full fine‑tuning consistently outperforms other strategies. They also show that sequential LoRA and model merging can preserve earlier skills and improve off‑task robustness, offering practical guidelines for real‑world deployment.
By Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan TN
arXiv:2605.07111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent literature on fine-tuning Large Language Models highlights a fundamental debate. While Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) provides greater represe...
By Haozhan Tang, Xiuqi Zhu, Xinyin Zhang, Boxun Li, Virginia Smith, Kevin Kuo
arXiv:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.
By Hongyang Chen, Zhongwu Sun, Hongfei Ye, Kunchi Li, Xuemin Lin
arXiv:2608. 05161v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction-tuned LLMs are deployed into environments where domains evolve, yet extending a fine-tuned model's capabilities without full retraining remains an unsolved practical challenge.
By Josh McGiff, Salma Mekaoui, Robert Shanahan, Nikola S. Nikolov
arXiv:2508. 02932v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity as a fine-tuning approach for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its low resource requirements and good performance.
By Minghao Yan, Zhuang Wang, Zhen Jia, Shivaram Venkataraman, Yida Wang
arXiv:2601. 16991v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments.
By Longteng Zhang, Sen Wu, Shuai Hou, Zhengyu Qing, Zhuo Zheng, Danning Ke, Qihong Lin, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu
arXiv:2605. 19276v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, the field of artificial intelligence has undergone a paradigm shift from task-specific small-scale models to general-purpose large language models (LLMs).
By Maosong Cao, Kai Chen, Haodong Duan, Yixiao Fang, Zhiwei Fei, Tong Gao, Ge Jiaye, Mo Li, Hongwei Liu, Junnan Liu, Yuan Liu, Chengqi Lyu, Han Lyu, Ningsheng Ma, Zerun Ma, Yu Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Linchen Xiao, Zhuozhi Xiong, Jun Xu, Haochen Ye, Zhaohui Yu, Yike Yuan, Songyang Zhang, Yufeng Zhao, Fengzhe Zhou, Peiheng Zhou, Dongsheng Zhu, Lin Zhu, Jingming Zhuo