Two techniques, two different problems, and why the question is not really "which one wins" The post RAG vs Fine-Tuning Explained: What They Actually Do and When to Use Each appeared first on Towards Data Science .
By Maria Mouschoutzi
Synthetic data is widely used to train large language models because it is inexpensive to generate and easy to control. As models are increasingly deployed as agents, synthetic trajectories are likely to become an important source of training data for agentic behavior.
arXiv:2607. 08255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly serve as teachers generating training data for smaller students.
By Miseong Shawn Kim
arXiv:2607. 08643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly constrained by memory capacity, weight bandwidth, and checkpoint storage during deployment.
By Yuantian Shao, Peisong Wang, Zhilei Liu, Chuangyi Li, Yuanteng Chen, Pengcheng Xie, Yiwu Yao, Zhihui Wei, Jian Cheng
arXiv:2604. 13356v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanisms for continued self-improvement of language models without external supervision remain an open challenge.
By Shi Feng, Hanlin Zhang, Fan Nie, Sham Kakade, Yiling Chen
arXiv:2607. 07719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning adapts a large language model to one task cheaply, but across a task sequence LoRA-style methods keep stacking low-rank updates on the same frozen weight, so each new task tends to overwrite the previous ones.
By Wentao Lu
arXiv:2607. 07748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models achieve strong code generation for high resource languages like Python and Java but suffer sharp performance drops on Low-Resource Programming Languages~(LRPLs) such as Julia.
By Didula Samaraweera, Anjana Supun, Srinath Perera
arXiv:2607. 08716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-horizon tasks, decision-relevant state is often scattered across an expanding trajectory, while the action agent must surface it and act.
By Yifan Wu, Lizhu Zhang, Yuhang Zhou, Mingyi Wang, Bo Peng, Serena Li, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao
arXiv:2607. 08409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based ASR adapted to regulated domains such as banking is bottlenecked by privacy: real speech is costly and legally constrained to collect, making synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) an attractive substitute.
By Shashi Kumar, Yanis Labrak, Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Kadri Hacio\u{g}lu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv:2603. 12478v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal instruction tuning is often compute-inefficient because training budgets are spread across large mixed image-video pools whose utility is highly uneven.
By Rujie Wu, Haozhe Zhao, Hai Ci, Yizhou Wang
arXiv:2607. 08046v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models fine-tuned for forecasting can be accurate yet poorly calibrated, and their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may not faithfully reflect the evidence behind a forecast.
By Rapha\"el Sarfati, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari, Siddharth Boppana, Christopher J. Earls, Srikar Varadaraj, Eric Ho
arXiv:2601. 02871v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion.
By Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huai Yuen Khor, Hao Wang, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sicheng Zhou, Sijia Yao
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
By Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai
arXiv:2607. 08312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How should language interface with a world model's discrete symbol system?
By Jiayi Fang
arXiv:2607. 08393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning LLMs to inject new knowledge faces a critical challenge: LLMs can quickly memorize new facts, yet fail to use them for downstream reasoning tasks.
By Lu Dai, Ziyang Rao, Yili Wang, Hanqing Wang, Hao Liu, Hui Xiong
arXiv:2503. 12999v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various multi-modal tasks.
By Ruichuan An, Kai Zeng, Ming Lu, Sihan Yang, Renrui Zhang, Huitong Ji, Hao Liang, Wentao Zhang
arXiv:2607. 07989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based multi-agent systems enable complex problem solving through coordinated reasoning and action, but their distributed structure also introduces new challenges in diagnosing system-level failures.
By Yufei Xia, Anjun Gao, Yueyang Quan, Zhuqing Liu, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2407. 13632v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deploying deep learning-based imaging tools across various clinical sites poses significant challenges due to inherent domain shifts and regulatory hurdles associated with site-specific fine-tuning.
By Abhijeet Parida, Antonia Alomar, Zhifan Jiang, Pooneh Roshanitabrizi, Austin Tapp, Maria Ledesma-Carbayo, Ziyue Xu, Syed Muhammed Anwar, Marius George Linguraru, Holger R. Roth
arXiv:2607. 08763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning has become a core capability for large models, especially when reliable decisions require understanding logical consequences.
By Xinyan Chen, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Dongzhi Jiang, Hongsheng Li
arXiv:2607. 08257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters.
By Yuming Yang, Xiao Sun, Yuanwei Zou, Zhengxiao Wu, Yun Chen, Jiang Zhong, Haoyang Zeng, Jingwang Huang, Kaiwen Wei