Enhancing LLM Knowledge Learning through Generalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhu, Mingkang, Chen, Xi, Wang, Zhongdao, Yu, Bei, Zhao, Hengshuang, Jia, Jiaya
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
author_facet Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
contents As Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, faithfully integrating evolving factual knowledge into these models remains a critical challenge. Continued pre-training on paraphrased data has shown empirical promise for enhancing knowledge acquisition. However, this approach is often costly and unreliable, as it relies on external models or manual effort for rewriting, and may inadvertently alter the factual content. In this work, we hypothesize and empirically show that an LLM's ability to continually predict the same factual knowledge tokens given diverse paraphrased contexts is positively correlated with its capacity to extract that knowledge via question-answering. Based on this view and aiming to improve generalization to diverse paraphrased contexts, we introduce two strategies to enhance LLMs' ability to predict the same knowledge tokens given varied contexts, thereby enhancing knowledge acquisition. First, we propose formatting-based data augmentation, which diversifies documents conveying the same knowledge by altering document formats rather than their content, thereby preserving factual integrity. Second, we adopt sharpness-aware minimization as the optimizer to better improve generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate our methods' effectiveness in both continued pre-training and instruction tuning, and further gains can be achieved by combining with paraphrased data.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Enhancing LLM Knowledge Learning through Generalization
Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
As Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, faithfully integrating evolving factual knowledge into these models remains a critical challenge. Continued pre-training on paraphrased data has shown empirical promise for enhancing knowledge acquisition. However, this approach is often costly and unreliable, as it relies on external models or manual effort for rewriting, and may inadvertently alter the factual content. In this work, we hypothesize and empirically show that an LLM's ability to continually predict the same factual knowledge tokens given diverse paraphrased contexts is positively correlated with its capacity to extract that knowledge via question-answering. Based on this view and aiming to improve generalization to diverse paraphrased contexts, we introduce two strategies to enhance LLMs' ability to predict the same knowledge tokens given varied contexts, thereby enhancing knowledge acquisition. First, we propose formatting-based data augmentation, which diversifies documents conveying the same knowledge by altering document formats rather than their content, thereby preserving factual integrity. Second, we adopt sharpness-aware minimization as the optimizer to better improve generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate our methods' effectiveness in both continued pre-training and instruction tuning, and further gains can be achieved by combining with paraphrased data.
title Enhancing LLM Knowledge Learning through Generalization
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03705