arXiv Computation and Language By Zehao Zhao, Shangjian Yin, Rui Liu, Chongyang Bai, Mark Ibrahim, Kavosh Asadi, Yuchen Lu, Hang Cui, Hamed Firooz

Beyond Update Counts: A Control Map for Evaluating Test-Time Model Updates

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces the Control Map, an evaluation framework for test‑time model updates that records the specific updates made before each answer and separately assesses acquisition, retention, locality, and performance in new settings. It demonstrates that update scheduling can dramatically affect accuracy, that learning an edit does not guarantee lasting or contained changes, and that no single editor consistently outperforms others across models and benchmarks. The authors argue that evaluations should report update histories and assess these dimensions separately.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

UpgradeBench: A Decision-Centric Benchmark for Upgrading Fine-Tuned LLM Specialists

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."

By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

A Score Is Not a Policy: Measuring the Value of Adaptive Revision

The paper investigates how a higher‑level controller in a hierarchical latent reasoner decides whether to preserve or replace a lower‑level strategy. Experiments across different training seeds show that learned revision timing can produce varied policies, but none surpasses a fixed, forced timing policy on the same checkpoint. The study highlights that state‑dependent control can alter actions without improving task performance, and that timing decisions are order‑sensitive and largely captured by a strong fixed schedule.

By Ayushi Chadha
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Why Constrained Updates Still Forget: A Functional-Path Analysis of Continual SFT

The paper investigates why constrained updates in supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) still lead to forgetting by developing a functional‑path analysis that decomposes changes in old loss into controlled direction, gradient staleness, probe mismatch, and finite‑step effects. It introduces a conditional refresh budget and identifies a restoring direction provided by informative replay, showing that the placement of constraints relative to Adam and the granularity of constraints significantly affect retention across code‑label audits. The study also explores checkpointed generation, replay schedules, and sequential‑task comparisons, demonstrating that subspace regularization, projection, and supervised replay differentially influence backward transfer and content retention.

By Qingsen Ma, Dianyun Wang, Jiahong Liu, Irwin King