Fine-Tuning without Performance Degradation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Han, White, Adam, White, Martha
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wang, Han
White, Adam
White, Martha
author_facet Wang, Han
White, Adam
White, Martha
contents Fine-tuning policies learned offline remains a major challenge in application domains. Monotonic performance improvement during \emph{fine-tuning} is often challenging, as agents typically experience performance degradation at the early fine-tuning stage. The community has identified multiple difficulties in fine-tuning a learned network online, however, the majority of progress has focused on improving learning efficiency during fine-tuning. In practice, this comes at a serious cost during fine-tuning: initially, agent performance degrades as the agent explores and effectively overrides the policy learned offline. We show across a range of settings, many offline-to-online algorithms exhibit either (1) performance degradation or (2) slow learning (sometimes effectively no improvement) during fine-tuning. We introduce a new fine-tuning algorithm, based on an algorithm called Jump Start, that gradually allows more exploration based on online estimates of performance. Empirically, this approach achieves fast fine-tuning and significantly reduces performance degradations compared with existing algorithms designed to do the same.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00913
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-Tuning without Performance Degradation
Wang, Han
White, Adam
White, Martha
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Fine-tuning policies learned offline remains a major challenge in application domains. Monotonic performance improvement during \emph{fine-tuning} is often challenging, as agents typically experience performance degradation at the early fine-tuning stage. The community has identified multiple difficulties in fine-tuning a learned network online, however, the majority of progress has focused on improving learning efficiency during fine-tuning. In practice, this comes at a serious cost during fine-tuning: initially, agent performance degrades as the agent explores and effectively overrides the policy learned offline. We show across a range of settings, many offline-to-online algorithms exhibit either (1) performance degradation or (2) slow learning (sometimes effectively no improvement) during fine-tuning. We introduce a new fine-tuning algorithm, based on an algorithm called Jump Start, that gradually allows more exploration based on online estimates of performance. Empirically, this approach achieves fast fine-tuning and significantly reduces performance degradations compared with existing algorithms designed to do the same.
title Fine-Tuning without Performance Degradation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00913