Forgetting: A New Mechanism Towards Better Large Language Model Fine-tuning

TMLR Paper6522 Authors

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose capabilities. However, the efficacy of SFT hinges on data quality as well as data volume, otherwise it may result in limited performance gains or even degradation relative to the associated baselines. To mitigate such reliance, we suggest categorizing tokens within each corpus into two parts---positive and negative tokens---based on whether they are useful to improve model performance. Positive tokens can be trained in common ways, whereas negative tokens, which may lack essential semantics or be misleading, should be explicitly forgotten. Overall, the token categorization facilitate the model to learn less informative message, and the forgetting process shapes a knowledge boundary to guide the model on what information to learn more precisely. We conduct experiments across diverse and well-established benchmarks using various model architectures, demonstrating that this forgetting mechanism enhances model performance.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Hao_Tang1

Submission Number: 6522