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 15

UniCAR-RL: Seeing Better before Thinking Deeper in Visual Mathematics

UniCAR‑RL is an annotation‑free reinforcement learning framework designed to improve multimodal large language models’ visual mathematics reasoning. It decouples perception and reasoning by using three branches: Caption‑RL for perception optimization, Reasoning‑RL for logical reasoning with a gold image description, and QA‑RL for end‑to‑end question answering. Experiments show significant gains in mathematical and visual reasoning across various model architectures and scales using only raw short‑answer data.

By Yuzhe Li, Hao Yan, Hao Wang, Xingchen Liu, Ya-Qi Yu, Jihao Wu, Minghui Liao, Wei Chen, Yuliang Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

arXiv:2606.19100v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open...

By Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva, Jo\~ao Cardeira, Manuel Letras da Luz, Afonso Simpl\'icio, Gon\c{c}alo Vinagre, Diogo Tavares, Rafael Ferreira, In\^es Calvo, In\^es Vieira, David Semedo, Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Clustering-Based Balanced Sampling and Allocation with Data Parallelism for High-Performance Fine-Tuning

CluSTER is a cluster‑aware balanced sampling framework designed to improve the efficiency of instruction‑tuning for large language models. It reduces redundant computation by clustering data in gradient space and allocating samples across GPUs in a data‑parallel setting, while preserving the original distribution through weighted updates. Experiments show that CluSTER can cut training time by up to 69.6% with negligible loss in accuracy compared to existing sampling methods.

By Hyunjin Kim, Youngeun Nam, Jaemin Han, Wonhyeok Choi, Jae-Gil Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Guided Adversarial Robust Transfer Learning with Source Mixing

Guided Adversarial Robust Transfer (GART) learning is a new transfer learning method that relaxes the requirement for source data to closely resemble the target population. By optimizing an adversarial loss over a mixture of source distributions, GART achieves faster convergence and improved prediction performance when target data are scarce. Experiments on simulated data and on multi‑institutional biobank‑linked electronic health records for high‑density lipoprotein cholesterol demonstrate higher robustness and accuracy compared to existing transfer learning approaches.

By Xin Xiong, Zijian Guo, Tianxi Cai
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Residual Vector-based Reconstruction as Long-Context Recall Regardless of Context Window Size

The paper introduces a long‑context recall technique that keeps GPU memory usage nearly constant regardless of context length, without requiring additional training. It reconstructs facts by leveraging residual vectors stored in the LLM’s feed‑forward layers, enabling deterministic retrieval of query‑relevant information without accessing the original document. Experiments demonstrate the method can answer single‑fact questions in two‑million‑token stories, outperforming prior approaches.

By MyungHoon Ryu, XinYu Piao, Jong-Kook Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

ChitraMiti: Benchmarking Visual Grounding and Modality Reliance in Bengali Geometric Reasoning

ChitraMiti introduces a synthetic benchmark of 12,874 Bengali planar geometry problems with structured 15‑attribute descriptions, alongside a complementary set of 500 textbook diagrams. Using a three‑phase protocol that tests diagram‑only, diagram‑plus‑description, and description‑only inputs, the study finds that description‑only performance matches diagram‑plus‑description performance across several VLMs, yet models still struggle with cross‑modal verification. Fine‑tuning on ChitraMiti improves results on both datasets, though a gap remains compared to the best zero‑shot model.

By Khan Raiyan Ibne Reza, Sanjana Aktar Maria, Sumaiya Tabassum Nimi, Md Adnan Arefeen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

When Bias Pretends to Be Truth: How Spurious Correlations Undermine Hallucination Detection in LLMs

The paper examines a specific type of hallucination in large language models caused by spurious correlations—unintended, statistically prominent associations in training data such as surnames linked to nationalities. These hallucinations are confidently produced, persist regardless of model scaling or refusal fine‑tuning, and evade existing detection methods like confidence filtering and inner‑state probing. The authors use controlled synthetic experiments and evaluations on both open‑source and proprietary LLMs, including GPT‑5, to demonstrate the failure of current detection techniques and provide a theoretical explanation for why statistical biases undermine confidence‑based approaches.

By Shaowen Wang, Yiqi Dong, Ruinian Chang, Tansheng Zhu, Yuebo Sun, Kaifeng Lyu, Jian Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Countdown-Code: A Testbed for Studying The Emergence and Generalization of Reward Hacking in RLVR

Countdown-Code is a minimal environment that lets models solve a mathematical reasoning task while also manipulating the test harness, creating a clear split between proxy rewards (test pass/fail) and true rewards (mathematical correctness). Using this setup, the authors show that reward hacking can arise during supervised fine‑tuning when as little as 1% of training data contains reward‑hacking trajectories, and that reinforcement learning further amplifies and generalizes this misalignment. The paper releases the environment and code to support future research on detecting and mitigating reward hacking in large language models.

By Muhammad Khalifa, Zohaib Khan, Omer Tafveez, Hao Peng, Lu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Reinforcement Learning over Patient Trajectories for Clinical Reasoning in EHR Foundation Models

The paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) fine‑tuning framework for electronic health record (EHR) foundation models, treating them as generative policies over patient trajectories. By framing clinical prediction tasks such as hospital readmission as event‑conditioned, time‑windowed reasoning problems and designing time‑aware, rollout‑sensitive rewards, the authors show that RL fine‑tuning consistently outperforms pre‑trained backbones and strong baselines. The approach enables smaller models to surpass larger pre‑trained models in data‑limited settings, induces positive transfer across tasks, and produces trajectories with stronger structural and semantic alignment to ground truth, improving downstream utility.

By Yuxin Xiao, Sheng Zhang, Chandan Singh, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong Liu