Measuring training data influence consistently across language model pretraining is challenging. It is difficult to select downstream tasks or validation sets representative of a model's general capabilities, and reliance on task performance at intermediate checkpoints complicates comparisons across training.
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:2609.37169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mid-training equips pretrained large language models with specialized and reasoning capabilities, but the returns of this stage are bounded since add...
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).
arXiv:2607. 09204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained language models often exhibit structured weight spectra, suggesting that training may repeatedly produce similar layerwise and component-wise organization.
The paper investigates how a probe can decode in‑context bindings on model errors and how probe‑guided steering can repair them. It tracks probe accuracy, model output, and steering response across public pretraining and post‑training checkpoints, noting that probe accuracy improves during Pythia pretraining and that steering benefits grow with model size. The study also shows that decoders trained on final state or candidate logits do not outperform each other on late‑checkpoint errors, and presents an information‑theoretic counterexample explaining why decodability on errors alone cannot prove discarded output information.
arXiv:2608. 10090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced code generation, where executable feedback provides a more reliable learning signal than textual imitation alone.
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."
arXiv:2608. 14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-weight language models are fine-tuned, quantized, pruned, and merged, yet their provenance is often undocumented.
arXiv:2607. 25063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developers judge a model checkpoint by how it behaves.
arXiv:2609.25482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) pretraining conventionally returns the raw final iterate. This couples two design choices: the learning-rate schedule that g...
arXiv:2607. 20046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the widespread deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical domains, reducing the cost of model validation under limited testing budgets has become increasingly important.