The paper investigates how supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) affects different layers of language models, finding that middle layers (20–80%) remain stable while the final layers are highly sensitive to changes. Using information‑theoretic, geometric, and optimization metrics across 1B‑32B models, the authors identify a depth‑dependent pattern and introduce Mid‑Block Efficient Tuning, which updates only the critical intermediate layers. Experiments show this method outperforms standard LoRA by up to 10.2 % on GSM8K (OLMo2‑7B) with lower parameter overhead, suggesting that alignment can be achieved with localized architectural changes.
arXiv:2608. 19800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a prominent fine-tuning method for large models, achieving competitive performance with reduced memory overhead.
arXiv:2606. 05516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) using only forward passes, but it remains unclear how useful adaptation is distributed across layers.
arXiv:2606. 14970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data.
arXiv:2607. 08733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work identified Super Weights, individual parameters whose removal degrades model performance by orders of magnitude.
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.
arXiv:2602. 14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task.
The paper introduces Ladder Side Tuning (LST), a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning method that adds a lightweight side network to large language models. LST matches QLoRA’s compute scaling while halving peak memory usage, enabling 7B‑parameter models to be fine‑tuned on a single 12 GB GPU with 2k‑token contexts without gradient checkpointing. The authors also present xLadder, a depth‑extended variant that increases effective depth through cross‑connections, allowing deeper reasoning without extra memory overhead.
arXiv:2607. 11940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As the scale of large pre-trained models continues to grow, fine-tuning them under limited memory budgets has become increasingly challenging.
arXiv:2602. 05988v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on web-scale datasets becomes fundamental for advancing general-purpose AI.
arXiv:2506. 11042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a resource-efficient strategy for adapting Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) by learning a small number of task-specific updates $\Delta W$.
arXiv:2607. 26247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tunes large pretrained models at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but its performance depends strongly on how the adapters are initialized.
arXiv:2601. 04710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation.