Selective Self-Rehearsal: A Fine-Tuning Approach to Improve Generalization in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Gupta, Sonam, Nandwani, Yatin, Yehudai, Asaf, Mishra, Mayank, Pandey, Gaurav, Raghu, Dinesh, Joshi, Sachindra
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Gupta, Sonam
Nandwani, Yatin
Yehudai, Asaf
Mishra, Mayank
Pandey, Gaurav
Raghu, Dinesh
Joshi, Sachindra
author_facet Gupta, Sonam
Nandwani, Yatin
Yehudai, Asaf
Mishra, Mayank
Pandey, Gaurav
Raghu, Dinesh
Joshi, Sachindra
contents Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task or the characteristics of the training data, resulting in a loss of generalization. This paper introduces Selective Self-Rehearsal (SSR), a fine-tuning approach that achieves performance comparable to the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while improving generalization. SSR leverages the fact that there can be multiple valid responses to a query. By utilizing the model's correct responses, SSR reduces model specialization during the fine-tuning stage. SSR first identifies the correct model responses from the training set by deploying an appropriate LLM as a judge. Then, it fine-tunes the model using the correct model responses and the gold response for the remaining samples. The effectiveness of SSR is demonstrated through experiments on the task of identifying unanswerable queries across various datasets. The results show that standard SFT can lead to an average performance drop of up to $16.7\%$ on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and TruthfulQA. In contrast, SSR results in close to $2\%$ drop on average, indicating better generalization capabilities compared to standard SFT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_04787
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selective Self-Rehearsal: A Fine-Tuning Approach to Improve Generalization in Large Language Models
Gupta, Sonam
Nandwani, Yatin
Yehudai, Asaf
Mishra, Mayank
Pandey, Gaurav
Raghu, Dinesh
Joshi, Sachindra
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task or the characteristics of the training data, resulting in a loss of generalization. This paper introduces Selective Self-Rehearsal (SSR), a fine-tuning approach that achieves performance comparable to the standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while improving generalization. SSR leverages the fact that there can be multiple valid responses to a query. By utilizing the model's correct responses, SSR reduces model specialization during the fine-tuning stage. SSR first identifies the correct model responses from the training set by deploying an appropriate LLM as a judge. Then, it fine-tunes the model using the correct model responses and the gold response for the remaining samples. The effectiveness of SSR is demonstrated through experiments on the task of identifying unanswerable queries across various datasets. The results show that standard SFT can lead to an average performance drop of up to $16.7\%$ on multiple benchmarks, such as MMLU and TruthfulQA. In contrast, SSR results in close to $2\%$ drop on average, indicating better generalization capabilities compared to standard SFT.
title Selective Self-Rehearsal: A Fine-Tuning Approach to Improve Generalization in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04787