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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zeng, Runjia, Wang, Qifan, Guan, Qiang, Tang, Ruixiang, Huang, Lifu, Wang, Zhenting, Zhang, Xueling, Han, Cheng, Liu, Dongfang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19739
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Table of Contents:
  • Fine tuning has been regarded as a de facto approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but the high training memory consumption inherited from LLMs makes this process inefficient. Among existing memory efficient approaches, activation-related optimization has proven particularly effective, as activations consistently dominate overall memory consumption. Although prior arts offer various activation optimization strategies, their data-agnostic nature ultimately results in ineffective and unstable fine tuning. In this paper, we propose TokenSeek, a universal plugin solution for various transformer-based models through instance-aware token seeking and ditching, achieving significant fine-tuning memory savings (e.g., requiring only 14.8% of the memory on Llama3.2 1B) with on-par or even better performance. Furthermore, our interpretable token seeking process reveals the underlying reasons for its effectiveness, offering valuable insights for future research on token efficiency. Homepage: https://runjia.tech/iclr_tokenseek/