Fine-tuning and adaptation

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

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Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

V-REX: Efficient Specialist VLM Training for Veterinary X-Rays

The paper introduces V-REX, a specialist vision‑language model (VLM) tailored for veterinary X‑ray interpretation. By redesigning the VLM pipeline—including text tokenisation, pre‑training, grounding, and inference—the authors demonstrate that a carefully engineered model can outperform larger generalist foundation models while using far fewer parameters, data, and compute. V-REX is the first VLM capable of generating diagnostic reports for veterinary radiographs, achieving significant gains over open foundation models on this task.

Towards Data Science
Aug 20

How to Fine-Tune an LLM: An End-to-End Guide

The article "How to Fine-Tune an LLM: An End-to-End Guide" offers a practical, hands‑on walkthrough for fine‑tuning large language models in real‑world scenarios. It covers the entire process from data preparation to deployment, providing readers with actionable steps to adapt LLMs to specific tasks. The guide is aimed at practitioners looking to implement fine‑tuning in a structured, end‑to‑end manner.

By Sam Black
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Distilling Aggregate Mobility Statistics into a Language Model Policy for Post-Event Crowd Simulation

The paper presents a method to align a language‑model‑based crowd agent with aggregate mobility data by fine‑tuning it to match observed destination compositions derived from origin‑to‑destination flows. The approach uses iterative proportional fitting to reweight the model’s destination distribution and corrects for dominant destination inflation by training a low‑rank adapter on resampled trajectories. Experiments on mobile network counts from two baseball games show a 25% reduction in destination‑share error while maintaining similar grid correlation across policies.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

TextRefine: Improving Textual Fidelity, Spatial Placement, and Glyph Rendering for Text Editing in Product Posters

Text editing in product posters entails inserting new text or replacing existing text while preserving product appearance, background content, and global composition. Despite recent progress in instruction-based image editing, general-purpose models remain unreliable in this setting: they often omit or incorrectly render the target text, place it over salient products or pre-existing content, and produce structurally distorted or visually inconsistent glyphs.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Understanding Multilingual Medical ASR Adaptation Through Layer-Wise Analysis

The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models. By comparing various fine‑tuning strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only, German‑only, two‑stage EN→EN+DE, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—it shows that fine‑tuning significantly improves performance, with the best model varying by setting. Layer‑wise encoder analysis reveals that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main representation shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted space, and that domain and language signals remain recoverable across layers.

By Souranil Kahali, Rituparna Bose, Abner Hernandez, Tomas Arias-Vergara, Andreas Maier, Ning Ma, Paula Andrea Perez-Toro
arXiv AI
Aug 20

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5: A Behavior World Model for Robust Whole-Body Control with Environment Interaction

GigaBrain-WBC-0.5 is a Behavior World Model that uses a causal Transformer to predict next actions, states, and a distribution over latent behavior commands for humanoid whole-body control. It incorporates an automatic terrain-annotation pipeline to recover 3D contact geometry from motion data, allowing the model to learn how terrain and objects influence dynamics. The system detects implausible commands online, retracts them onto learned behaviors, and achieves high success rates in terrain interaction, command robustness, and fall recovery, with promising hardware trials on different robots.

By Ziyang Cheng, Tianshu Tang, Jinxin Lan, Xinze Chen, Yuhan Gong, Zhichao Liu, Changzhong Wu, Yahao Mao, Zongyan Deng, Mingxuan Ma, Huasen Xi, Yilong Liu, Yutong Wu, Xiaofeng Wang, Yang Wang, Yun Ye, Guan Huang, Xiaojie Jin, Zheng Zhu, Jiwen Lu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

When Audio-Language Models Fail to Leverage Multimodal Context for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

The paper evaluates whether audio‑language models can use multimodal clinical context to improve dysarthric speech recognition. Using a benchmark built on the Speech Accessibility Project dataset, the authors test diagnosis labels, clinician ratings, and detailed clinical descriptions as prompts for nine models. They find that these prompts yield negligible or negative effects on word error rate, though fine‑tuning with LoRA and mixed prompt formats reduces WER by 52% and benefits certain subgroups such as Down syndrome and mild‑severity speakers.

By Pehu\'en Moure, Niclas Pokel, Bilal Bounajma, Yingqiang Gao, Roman Boehringer, Longbiao Cheng, Shih-Chii Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

MedStruct-S: A Benchmark for Key Discovery, Key-Conditioned QA and Semi-Structured Extraction from OCR Clinical Reports

MedStruct‑S is a benchmark for semi‑structured information extraction from OCR‑derived clinical reports, covering key discovery, key‑conditioned QA, and end‑to‑end key‑value extraction. It contains 3,582 annotated real‑world report pages and evaluates models under unknown keys and OCR noise. Experiments show encoder‑only models excel at non‑null key‑conditioned QA, while fine‑tuned decoder‑only models achieve the strongest overall performance across model sizes.

By Yingyun Li, Yu Wang, Haiyang Qian
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Accurate Decoding of Natural Sentences from Non-Invasive Brain Recordings

Brain2Qwerty v2 is a model that decodes natural sentences from real‑time magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings, achieving an average word error rate of 39% across 22,000 sentences typed by nine subjects. The model uses character, word, and sentence‑level representations and shows that decoding accuracy improves log‑linearly with more data, narrowing the gap to intracranial brain‑computer interfaces. AI contributes by replacing hand‑crafted event detection with deep learning, fine‑tuning large language models for semantic extraction, and employing AI agents to refine the decoding pipeline through automated code development.

By Mingfang Zhang, Jarod L\'evy, Cedric Rommel, J\'er\'emy Rapin, Corentin Bel, Julie Bonnaire, Daniel Nieto, Pierre Bourdillon, Svetlana Pinet, St\'ephane d'Ascoli, Thomas Moreau, Jean-R\'emi King
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline reduces human annotation effort and improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages. The authors apply this method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the pipeline against leading multimodal large language models.

By Kartik Chincholikar, Kaushik Gopalan, Mihir Hasabnis
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Looped Language Models Improve Compositional Tool Calling

The paper investigates the use of looped language models for compositional tool calling, where models must coordinate multiple API calls and maintain state across interactions. Experiments on API-Bank, BFCL, and NESTful show that recurrent computation generally improves compositional and dependency-aware tool use, with accuracy increasing as recurrent depth grows. Adaptive inference offers a better compute‑performance trade‑off by allocating extra computation only when necessary.

By Andrei Cristian Popescu, Haitz S\'aez de Oc\'ariz Borde, Pietro Li\`o
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Training Chemical Plausibility-Aware Large Language Models for Single-Step Retrosynthesis

The paper introduces Top‑K prompting as a training and inference strategy to better capture the diverse, plausible predictions inherent in single‑step retrosynthesis. Using an ultra‑large dataset (CREED‑CCV‑2+USPTO‑XL) of ~45.6 million verified reactions, the authors train the Chemistry Constraint‑Consistent Language Model (C3LM). With fine‑tuning that incorporates ChemCensor‑based and novelty‑oriented rewards, C3LM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the OOD URSA‑expert‑2026 benchmark and demonstrates complementary reaction space exploration compared to conventional models, suggesting benefits for ensemble‑based retrosynthesis systems.

By Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Nikita Bondarev, Maksim Kuznetsov, Mathieu Reymond, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Finetuning Strategies for Querying Sounds by Vocal Imitation

The report details the winning approach for the AES AIMLA 2025 Challenge on querying sound effects by vocal imitation. It explores two fine‑tuning strategies: contrastive learning with a frozen, pretrained CED encoder, and joint contrastive‑triplet learning using a MobileNetV3 encoder with semi‑hard negatives. Updated post‑challenge, the document includes additional released details.

By Aditya Bhattacharjee, Christos Plachouras, Sungkyun Chang, Emmanouil Benetos
arXiv AI
Aug 20

A Few Cases Are All You Need: An Empirical Study of Annotation-Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning of MedSAM3

The study investigates how few expert-annotated cases are needed to fine‑tune MedSAM3 for abdominal organ segmentation using Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA). With only 10 annotated CT or MRI cases, the LoRA‑adapted models achieve performance comparable to specialist systems that require orders of magnitude more data, including reliable gallbladder segmentation and near‑state‑of‑the‑art results for liver, kidneys, and spleen. The approach also generalizes to cardiac segmentation on the Whole Heart dataset, and training takes only 3–5 hours per organ on a single GPU, roughly twice as fast as nnU-Net.

By Sachin Dudda Nagaraju, Bendik Skarre Abrahamsen, Ashkan Moradi, Mattijs Elschot
arXiv AI
Aug 20

GS-VLA: Plug-and-Play Viewpoint Canonicalization for Frozen VLA Policies via Gaussian Splatting

GS‑VLA introduces a lightweight, plug‑and‑play framework that uses a 4 M‑parameter 3D‑Gaussian canonicalizer to adapt frozen Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies to viewpoint shifts without retraining the policy. By treating viewpoint changes as a localized novel‑view synthesis problem under a locality assumption, the method normalizes observations through a scene‑ and policy‑independent disocclusion task. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that GS‑VLA recovers a large portion of performance lost due to camera displacement, improving results across different policy architectures, unseen task suites, and perturbation scales. whyItMatters":"The approach offers a computationally efficient alternative to costly fine‑tuning or generative augmentation, enabling robust VLA deployment in real‑world settings where camera configurations may vary."

By Yechan Park, HyunJin Kim
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Key Coverage Matters: Semi-Structured Extraction of OCR Clinical Reports

The paper presents a method for extracting key information from OCR‑digitized clinical reports, addressing challenges posed by heterogeneous documents and noisy OCR output. It introduces an open key space that is iteratively mined, normalized, clustered, and verified to build a canonical key inventory, and defines key coverage as a metric for inventory completeness. Experiments on reports from over 20 hospitals using a 0.2B BERT model show that performance improves steadily with key coverage, achieving high F1 scores when the top 90 keys are covered and outperforming a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑0.6B baseline.

By Yu Wang, Yingyun Li, Ying Qin, Haiyang Qian