Recent studies investigate the weight geometry through its spectral structure, which characterizes how the weights transform different input directions. Within this view, supervised fine-tuning (SFT)...
arXiv:2610.07518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety auditing of post-trained large language models typically relies on model behavior, requiring model execution and depending on the coverage of...
arXiv:2609.36569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Checkpoint selection is a routine decision in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): training produces multiple checkpoints, but only one is retained. Yet fix...
arXiv:2602. 09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data.
ReDraft is a reference‑driven revision method for continual post‑training of large multimodal language models. It uses the model’s own incorrect outputs as references, revises them, verifies the revisions, and fine‑tunes on the accepted ones, thereby combining explicit supervision with policy proximity. On tasks such as Counting, Clock Reading, and Jigsaw, ReDraft outperforms standard supervised fine‑tuning and on‑policy methods, achieving higher target‑task gains while dramatically reducing forgetting.
arXiv:2606. 04272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard LLM training pipeline applies reinforcement learning (RL) only after pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT).
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."
The paper presents a comprehensive framework for comparing parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods by treating each as a smooth map from a small parameter space into weight space, with a pretrained checkpoint as the base point. It identifies three key invariants—image near the base point, fibre dynamics, and base change—that explain expressivity, training dynamics, and initialization behavior. The authors prove numerous results about common PEFT techniques (e.g., LoRA, Householder adaptation) and classify 382 methods from 138 papers using seven coordinate descriptors.
Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later training. One recently popular technique for such inter...
arXiv:2607. 25063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developers judge a model checkpoint by how it behaves.
arXiv:2609.01244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every supervised fine-tuning run forces the same chain of decisions, such as learning rate, batch size, LoRA or full fine-tuning, how many epochs, whic...
arXiv:2610.00767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later trai...