Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models via Selective Parameter Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wan, Weijie, Zhao, Jiangjiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wan, Weijie
Zhao, Jiangjiang
author_facet Wan, Weijie
Zhao, Jiangjiang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in general language understanding, generation and other tasks. However, when fine-tuning for specific domain tasks, the general knowledge accumulated in the pre-training phase is often partially overwritten or forgotten due to parameter updates, which severely limits the generalization ability and transferability of LLMs. Traditional fine-tuning strategies mostly train on the entire parameter space, ignoring the heterogeneity of model parameters, that is, some parameters are extremely important for general tasks, while other parameters are more sensitive to specific tasks. To alleviate the above problems, this paper innovatively proposes a parameter element importance evaluation method, which divides parameters into "core parameters" and "non-core parameters" by distinguishing the importance of parameters for general language ability tasks and specific domain tasks, and fixes the core parameters during fine-tuning, and only fine-tunes the non-core parameters. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 show that our method can mitigate catastrophic forgetting while enhancing the adaptability of the model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models via Selective Parameter Optimization
Wan, Weijie
Zhao, Jiangjiang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in general language understanding, generation and other tasks. However, when fine-tuning for specific domain tasks, the general knowledge accumulated in the pre-training phase is often partially overwritten or forgotten due to parameter updates, which severely limits the generalization ability and transferability of LLMs. Traditional fine-tuning strategies mostly train on the entire parameter space, ignoring the heterogeneity of model parameters, that is, some parameters are extremely important for general tasks, while other parameters are more sensitive to specific tasks. To alleviate the above problems, this paper innovatively proposes a parameter element importance evaluation method, which divides parameters into "core parameters" and "non-core parameters" by distinguishing the importance of parameters for general language ability tasks and specific domain tasks, and fixes the core parameters during fine-tuning, and only fine-tunes the non-core parameters. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 show that our method can mitigate catastrophic forgetting while enhancing the adaptability of the model.
title Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models via Selective Parameter Optimization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17051