PAFT: Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wei, Chenxing, Shu, Yao, Ou, Mingwen, He, Ying Tiffany, Yu, Fei Richard
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wei, Chenxing
Shu, Yao
Ou, Mingwen
He, Ying Tiffany
Yu, Fei Richard
author_facet Wei, Chenxing
Shu, Yao
Ou, Mingwen
He, Ying Tiffany
Yu, Fei Richard
contents Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often causes overfitting to specific prompt wording, where minor phrasing variations drastically reduce performance. To address this, we propose Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning (PAFT), a method that enhances robustness through dynamic prompt variation during training. PAFT first generates diverse synthetic prompts, then continuously samples from this set to construct training instances, forcing models to learn fundamental task principles rather than surface-level patterns. Across systematic evaluations using both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT), PAFT demonstrates substantially improved prompt robustness, achieving 7% higher generalization accuracy on unseen prompts than standard methods. In addition to enhanced robustness, PAFT consistently yields superior overall performance on established benchmarks for question answering, mathematical reasoning, and tool use. Notably, models trained with PAFT attain 3.2 faster inference speeds due to reduced prompt sensitivity. Ablation studies further validate effectiveness of PAFT, while theoretical analysis reveals that PAFT can effectively enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of LLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PAFT: Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning
Wei, Chenxing
Shu, Yao
Ou, Mingwen
He, Ying Tiffany
Yu, Fei Richard
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) often causes overfitting to specific prompt wording, where minor phrasing variations drastically reduce performance. To address this, we propose Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning (PAFT), a method that enhances robustness through dynamic prompt variation during training. PAFT first generates diverse synthetic prompts, then continuously samples from this set to construct training instances, forcing models to learn fundamental task principles rather than surface-level patterns. Across systematic evaluations using both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT), PAFT demonstrates substantially improved prompt robustness, achieving 7% higher generalization accuracy on unseen prompts than standard methods. In addition to enhanced robustness, PAFT consistently yields superior overall performance on established benchmarks for question answering, mathematical reasoning, and tool use. Notably, models trained with PAFT attain 3.2 faster inference speeds due to reduced prompt sensitivity. Ablation studies further validate effectiveness of PAFT, while theoretical analysis reveals that PAFT can effectively enhance the cross-domain generalization ability of LLM.
title PAFT: Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12859