用集成方法缓解语言模型微调中的过适应问题,提升性能与知识保留。
Understanding Overadaptation in Supervised Fine-Tuning: The Role of Ensemble Methods
- 通过集成预训练与微调模型权重,平衡偏差与方差。
- 集成模型在微调数据上表现优于单一微调模型。
- 理论分析揭示集成能有效缓解过适应现象,适合模型优化研究者。
在特定领域数据上进行监督微调(SFT)是适配基础模型的主流方法,但存在遗忘预训练知识的问题。本文发现,将预训练模型与微调模型集成可缓解此问题,且更显著的是,集成模型不仅保留通用知识,还在微调领域任务上表现优于单一微调模型。尽管集成方法在实践中成功,其理论机制仍不明确。我们建立了形式化理论分析,指出集成通过平衡由微调不足导致的偏差和由过拟合引入的方差来缓解过适应现象。相比正则化,集成提供更优解。我们在过参数化线性设置下分析表明,插值预训练与微调权重能显著提升性能。实验验证了理论结果,为集成方法提供了理论支持。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on domain-specific data is the dominant approach for adapting foundation models to specialized tasks. However, it has been observed that SFT models tend to forget knowledge acquired during pretraining. In vision models, ensembling a pretrained model with its fine-tuned counterpart has been shown to mitigate this issue. In this work, we demonstrate that the same holds for language models, and, more strikingly, we observe an overadaptation phenomenon: the ensemble model not only retains general knowledge from the foundation model but also outperforms the fine-tuned model even on the fine-tuning domain itself. Despite the empirical success of ensembling, a theoretical understanding of its benefits remains underexplored. We develop a formal theoretical analysis of the overadaptation phenomenon. Ensembling mitigates this by balancing two primary sources of error: bias, caused by insufficient fine-tuning, and variance, introduced by overfitting to fine-tuning data. While regularization techniques aim to address this trade-off, we show that ensembling provides a more effective solution. We analyze this phenomenon in over-parameterized linear settings and demonstrate that interpolating between pretrained and fine-tuned weights significantly improves performance. These findings offer theoretical justification for the observed advantages of model ensembling, supported by empirical experiments consistent with our analysis.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。