arXiv:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
By Guoli Wang, Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, An Wang
The paper introduces XTF, an explainable token‑level noise filtering framework for fine‑tuning large language models. XTF breaks down token contributions into reasoning importance, knowledge novelty, and task relevance, scores them, and masks gradients of noisy tokens to improve fine‑tuning. Experiments on math, code, and medicine tasks across seven LLMs show up to a 13.7% performance boost over standard fine‑tuning.
By Yuchen Yang, Wenze Lin, Enhao Huang, Zhixuan Chu, Hongbin Zhou, Lan Tao, Yiming Li, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren
CALIBURN is a new approach to large language model (LLM) unlearning that measures a model’s confidence in undesirable knowledge and uses this measure to fine‑tune unlearning gradient updates. By doing so, it offers more precise control over what is forgotten while better preserving the model’s overall utility. Experiments on benchmarks such as MUSE and WMDP show that CALIBURN outperforms existing methods in balancing knowledge removal with utility retention.
By Zhengbang Yang, Yisheng Zhong, Junyuan Hong, Zhuangdi Zhu
Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.
By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
arXiv:2603. 04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices.
By Piotr Jedryszek, Oliver M. Crook
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:2508. 06249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EM): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target domain.
By David Kacz\'er, Magnus J{\o}rgenv{\aa}g, Clemens Vetter, Esha Afzal, Robin Haselhorst, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai
arXiv:2606. 02837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate translation from Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL-to-FOL) underpins neurosymbolic AI systems and Natural Language Inference (NLI), making the quality of NL-to-FOL benchmarks essential -- yet these datasets have never been rigorously audited.
By Andrea Brunello, Cristian Curaba, Luca Geatti, Michele Mignani, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno
Multi-frame medical VQA appears to reward increasingly complex adaptation: controller-style inference, localization-aware reranking, static hard-negative mixing, and staged continuation all appear plausible from first principles. We test a simpler competing hypothesis on MedFrameQA: methods that remain tightly aligned with the benchmark's final answer objective should be the strongest \emph{robust} adaptation family once evaluation is controlled across fixed splits, matched budgets, repeated seeds, and calibration.
arXiv:2606. 12342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language.
By Chirag Chawla, Pratinav Seth, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu
arXiv:2609.36862v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface...
By Muhammad Zeeshan Akram, Mufid Kamel Marican, Anvesh Reddy Yenugu, Ali Zain Kaimkhani, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2607. 02781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment steers a frozen language model during decoding using auxiliary reward signals, avoiding the cost of repeated weight updates.
By Yaswanth Chittepu, Ativ Joshi, Sohini Chintala, Scott Niekum