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Main Authors: Nijasure, Atharva, Chowdhury, Tanya, Allan, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08780
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author Nijasure, Atharva
Chowdhury, Tanya
Allan, James
author_facet Nijasure, Atharva
Chowdhury, Tanya
Allan, James
contents We conduct a behavioral exploration of LoRA fine-tuned LLMs for Passage Reranking to understand how relevance signals are learned and deployed by Large Language Models. By fine-tuning Mistral-7B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and Pythia-6.9B on MS MARCO under diverse LoRA configurations, we investigate how relevance modeling evolves across checkpoints, the impact of LoRA rank (1, 2, 8, 32), and the relative importance of updated MHA vs. MLP components. Our ablations reveal which layers and projections within LoRA transformations are most critical for reranking accuracy. These findings offer fresh explanations into LoRA's adaptation mechanisms, setting the stage for deeper mechanistic studies in Information Retrieval. All models used in this study have been shared.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08780
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Relevance Emerges: Interpreting LoRA Fine-Tuning in Reranking LLMs
Nijasure, Atharva
Chowdhury, Tanya
Allan, James
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
We conduct a behavioral exploration of LoRA fine-tuned LLMs for Passage Reranking to understand how relevance signals are learned and deployed by Large Language Models. By fine-tuning Mistral-7B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and Pythia-6.9B on MS MARCO under diverse LoRA configurations, we investigate how relevance modeling evolves across checkpoints, the impact of LoRA rank (1, 2, 8, 32), and the relative importance of updated MHA vs. MLP components. Our ablations reveal which layers and projections within LoRA transformations are most critical for reranking accuracy. These findings offer fresh explanations into LoRA's adaptation mechanisms, setting the stage for deeper mechanistic studies in Information Retrieval. All models used in this study have been shared.
title How Relevance Emerges: Interpreting LoRA Fine-Tuning in Reranking LLMs
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08780