arXiv AI

Beyond Transfer Accuracy: Mechanism-Guided Controlled Adaptation for Low-Resource Languages

The paper introduces a method that adapts Contextual Decomposition for Transformers (CD‑T) to discover neural circuits without relying on clean counterfactuals, using label‑balanced activation means and task‑directional relevance scoring. These circuits are then employed in Circuit‑Targeted Supervised Fine‑Tuning (CT‑SFT), which restricts parameter updates to task‑relevant heads and LayerNorm, leading to competitive performance on low‑resource language adaptation tasks such as NusaX cross‑lingual sentiment transfer. CT‑SFT consistently avoids catastrophic forgetting and preserves source‑language and related‑task performance, offering a more controlled alternative to global fine‑tuning, as further validated on the XNLI benchmark.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

LP-SFT: Local-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Multimodal Entropy Structure

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 AI
1d ago

CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations

CroCo introduces cross‑lingual contrastive preference tuning on self‑generations, extending prior English‑only methods to 14 high‑ and low‑resource languages. A reward model trained solely on English preferences, applied to a multilingual base, yields effective within‑language rankings and improves performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings without catastrophic forgetting. The approach requires on‑policy data; off‑policy responses and online preference optimization offer limited gains, yet on structured tasks CroCo matches or surpasses the base model in most languages, and on open‑ended generation it wins 28/30 judge evaluations across 15 languages.

By Mike Zhang, Ali Basirat, Desmond Elliott