arXiv Machine Learning By Ye Yuan

The Alignment Tax Is Graded: Task-Selective Capability Loss Under Length-Normalized DPO with SFT Retention

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The study empirically investigates how length‑normalized Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with a Structured Fine‑Tuning (SFT) retention term (RPO objective) affects downstream capabilities of a Qwen3.5‑4B model fine‑tuned with sparse LoRA on structured financial‑filing tasks. Results show that the alignment tax is graded and task‑selective: extraction performance is largely preserved, JSON extraction degrades modestly, and router‑based tasks suffer severe loss, with most degradation attributed to suppression of rejected completions. The analysis uses 8 seeds, artifact‑aware scoring, and TOST equivalence testing to quantify these effects across different reward margins and precision settings.

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 Machine Learning.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

The study investigates how the composition of data during the mid‑training phase of language models affects performance across multiple domains. Experiments with Qwen3‑8B‑Base on five distinct KOR‑Bench domains show that moderate coverage (10%‑40%) yields the best per‑domain results, and that alignment passes cannot fully close the performance gaps created by mid‑training data choices. Additionally, zero coverage in mid‑training severely degrades accuracy, while a carefully tuned allocation can provide the largest overall pipeline improvement.

By Yunpeng Xu, Kun Zheng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

The paper investigates how per-domain data composition during the mid‑training phase (between pre‑training and alignment) affects model performance. Experiments with Qwen3‑8B‑Base across five KOR‑Bench domains show that a moderate coverage band (10%‑40%) yields the best performance for each domain, and that alignment passes cannot fully close the gaps created by suboptimal mid‑training allocations. Additionally, zero coverage during mid‑training severely degrades accuracy, while a carefully tuned allocation can provide the largest overall pipeline improvement.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

StrictPRMBench: A Replayable Evaluation Benchmark for Auditing Fixed-Score PRM Aggregation

StrictPRMBench is a replayable evaluation benchmark designed to audit fixed‑score PRM aggregation rules. It standardizes mathematical reasoning pools, scorer evidence, and deletion interventions so that different reducers confront identical selection problems. Across seven checkpoints and two benchmarks, the benchmark reveals that product aggregation yields higher deletion‑induced selection instability than geometric mean, with statistically significant differences in most cells.

By Pengfei Zheng