Fine-tuning and adaptation

LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning and domain adaptation — adapting a pretrained model without paying to train one.

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arXiv AI
Sep 17

Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation versus Retrieval Augmented Generation for Cultural-Related Question Answering

The paper compares Knowledge-Graph Based Augmentation (Graph-RAG) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for answering culturally specific questions. Using the LatamQA dataset, Graph-RAG, built automatically from Wikipedia via KGGen, matches RAG performance and reduces the base LLM’s error by 72% with a standard KG and 78% with a benchmark-aware variant. The approach also transfers zero‑shot to Portuguese, showing multilingual applicability.

By Pablo Poulenard, Yannis Karmim, Valentin Barri\`ere
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Lumen: Parameter-Efficient Alignment of Pretrained Vision and Language Encoders for Zero-Shot Computational Pathology

Lumen is a pathology vision‑language model that aligns frozen unimodal foundation models (Virchow2 and BioMedBERT) using rank‑4 adapters and projection heads, training only 0.40% of the total parameters on the QUILT‑1M corpus. It achieves the highest mean chance‑corrected balanced accuracy (0.546) across nine zero‑shot patch benchmarks and demonstrates strong performance on lymph‑node metastasis detection, with AUROC scores of 0.964 internally and 0.955 externally. While it ranks third in cross‑modal retrieval, Lumen’s low‑parameter training yields competitive results at both patch and slide levels.

By Kiarash Tajbakhsh, Abdelrahman Faqieh, Michael Jopiti, Javier Garcia-Baroja, Philipp Zens, Branislav Zagrapan, Yuri Tolkach, Martin D. Berger, Aurel Perren, Bastian Dislich, Inti Zlobec, Amjad Khan
arXiv AI
Sep 17

CapMap-MS-TTA: 3rd Place Solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge at ECCV 2026

The paper presents CapMap-MS-TTA, a unified multimodal model that achieved third place in the MUMU track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation Challenge. The solution tackles image tagging, open‑vocabulary object detection, and English captioning under strict resource limits, using an expanded keyword lexicon and lightweight expand‑hints for tagging, and Florence‑2 with multi‑scale and horizontal‑flip TTA plus label‑aware NMS for detection. The approach improves the reproduced Florence‑2 baseline from 15.16 to a best public score of 16.4815 without fine‑tuning.

By Chengfeng Qiu, Kaifeng Wei
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Suppressed, Not Erased: A Representational Trace of Edited Facts Survives Even Weight-Free Knowledge Editing

The paper investigates whether knowledge editing truly erases original facts from language models. Using a linear trace probe, the authors find that after editing a fact in GPT‑2‑XL, the original object remains highly decodable from hidden states across three different editing methods, even when the model behaves correctly on edited prompts. This suggests that editing suppresses rather than removes the original association in representational space.

By Priyansh Srivastava, Romit Chatterjee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

ReDIL-GNN: Resynthesis Domain Incremental Learning for Circuit Graph Neural Networks

ReDIL-GNN is a framework for resynthesis domain‑incremental learning in circuit graph neural networks. It adapts a fixed prediction or representation head as new synthesis styles appear and evaluates retention across all previously seen domains. The method introduces the Resynthesis Adaptability Index (RAI), a pre‑adaptation score that combines adaptation need, source‑equivalence recoverability, structural coverage, and update compatibility to decide whether to adapt, reuse, or defer updates.

By Rupesh Raj Karn, Johann Knechtel, Ozgur Sinanoglu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Temperon: Full-Time SAM Quality at a Third Less Wall-Clock

The paper introduces Temperon, a training strategy that uses plain SGD for the first 43% of the epoch budget and then hands off to a SAM‑wrapped Muon refiner for the remaining training. On datasets such as CIFAR‑10/100, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet, Temperon achieves the same or better accuracy as full‑time SAM while reaching key performance targets faster and at lower cost. Ablation studies show that the Muon refiner contributes the majority of the performance gain, while the initial SGD explorer and its restarts add negligible benefit.

By Stamatis Mastromichalakis
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Scaling Articulated Rationales for MLLM-based Recommendation

The paper introduces SARA, an industrial framework that scales articulated user rationales (AURs) for recommendation systems. It curates a high‑quality AUR dataset from 240 M users, trains a 7B‑parameter MLLM (SARA‑7B) to generate rationales for millions of authors, and integrates these generated rationales into a production ranking model (SARA‑Ranker). Offline and online experiments demonstrate that the system produces more specific, polarity‑consistent rationales and improves user engagement while reducing negative feedback.

By Haoke Xiao, Yueyang Liu, Yuhui Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yufei Liu, Jia Xu, Yalong Guan, Xiaolan Zhu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Shijun Wang, Shuang Yang, Zijie Meng, Zejian Zhang, Ruochen Yang, Xiangyu Wu, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Lantao Hu, Cheng Luo, Kun Gai
arXiv AI
Sep 17

EDCT-Bench: Uncovering Faithfulness Gaps in VLMs via Explanation-Driven Counterfactual Testing

EDCT-Bench is a benchmark that evaluates the faithfulness of Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) by using Explanation‑Driven Counterfactual Testing (EDCT). EDCT extracts visual concepts from a model’s natural language explanation, applies minimal verified edits to those concepts, and checks whether the model’s answer and explanation remain consistent with the edited image. The benchmark covers three domains—knowledge‑intensive VQA, safety‑critical driving, and 3D spatial reasoning—and reveals significant faithfulness gaps in current VLMs, while also showing that EDCT‑generated counterfactuals can improve training.

By Sihao Ding, Santosh Vasa, Aditi Ramadwar, Thomas Monninger
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Position Anchor Tuning: Towards Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Point Cloud Transformers

Position Anchor Tuning (PAT) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning method for pre‑trained point cloud transformers that improves inference efficiency. PAT reduces the computational cost of multi‑head attention and feed‑forward networks by using token aggregation‑expansion pairs: a token aggregation module (TAM) selects representative tokens based on 3D position anchors, and a token expansion module (TEM) propagates the learned representations back to the full token set. Combined with base‑sharing low‑rank adaptation (BSLoRA) for the TAMs, PAT achieves performance comparable to state‑of‑the‑art methods while requiring fewer trainable parameters and lower computational overhead.

By Zheng Liu, Xin Gao, Jinchao Zhu, Gao Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

One Size Does Not Fit All! Dynamic Retriever and Generator Selection for RAG

The paper introduces DRAG, a query‑adaptive framework that jointly selects retriever and generator configurations for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Two variants are presented: DRAG_QPP, a training‑free routing method using Query Performance Prediction and perplexity signals, and DRAG_SFT, a supervised approach that fine‑tunes an LLM to predict configurations. Experiments on three LLM families and four QA benchmarks show that DRAG_QPP matches strong static baselines while cutting inference latency, and DRAG_SFT consistently outperforms both static and training‑free adaptive baselines, demonstrating a better effectiveness‑efficiency trade‑off.

By Neeraj Anand, Payel Santra, Partha Basuchowdhuri, Debasis Ganguly, Sumit Bhatia
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Unleash LLMs Potential for Sequential Recommendation by Coordinating Dual Dynamic Index Mechanism

The paper introduces ED$^2$, an end‑to‑end large language model–based sequential recommender that integrates index generation and recommendation through a dual dynamic index mechanism. It employs a multigrained token regulator for alignment supervision and custom instruction‑tuning tasks to capture high‑order user‑item interactions. Experiments on three public datasets show ED$^2$ outperforms baselines with an average 19.62% gain in Hit‑Rate and 21.11% in NDCG.

By Jun Yin, Zhengxin Zeng, Mingzheng Li, Hao Yan, Chaozhuo Li, Weihao Han, Jianjin Zhang, Ruochen Liu, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shirui Pan, Senzhang Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

AuthorMix: Modular Authorship Style Transfer via Layer-wise Adapter Mixing

AuthorMix is a lightweight, modular framework for authorship style transfer that uses layer‑wise adapter mixing. It trains individual style‑specific LoRA adapters on a small set of high‑resource authors, enabling rapid adaptation to new target styles with only a few examples. The method achieves the highest combined style‑meaning score among baselines, including GPT‑5.1, and improves meaning preservation, as confirmed by human evaluation.

By Sarubi Thillainathan, Ji-Ung Lee, Michael Sullivan, Alexander Koller
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Multimodal Conditioning of Fine-Tuned Stable Diffusion XL for Controllable and Culturally Faithful Ulos Motif Generation

The paper introduces a multimodal generative framework that fine‑tunes Stable Diffusion XL with LoRA and couples it to a LLaMA 1.5‑7B language model to produce culturally faithful Batak Ulos motifs. Four conditioning mechanisms—text, image, representation, and semantic map—are jointly used to steer the generation, and an ablation study shows that combining all four actually degrades performance compared to selective combinations. A web prototype and user studies with weavers and the public demonstrate the system’s practical value for preserving and innovating Ulos design.

By Humasak Simanjuntak, Tamara Yunika Sianipar, Bronson T. M Siallagan, Difya Laurensya Ambarita, Arlinta Barus