A helps B while B hurts A: directed transfer in instruction-tuning mixture

Abstract

Adapting a language model to a specialized corpus means choosing which instruction-tuning tasks to train on under a fixed budget, and testing one choice costs a fine-tuning run. Common heuristics add more source tasks or pick sources similar to the target. The first assumes transfer is never negative; the second, that it is symmetric. We show that both assumptions fail: task $A$ can help task $B$ while $B$ hurts $A$, so helpfulness is a signed property of ordered source--target pairs. We introduce the transfer map, a signed estimate of how much each source helps or hurts each held-out target. We fit the map in hundreds of fine-tuning runs on Qwen3 and Mistral models from 0.6B to 32B parameters, with all sources drawn from one corpus and no training examples from the target. The map predicts a held-out target's accuracy on unseen mixtures: recorded before those runs, its predictions have less than half the error of a mixture-agnostic baseline. The map is specific to its target and corpus but transfers across model scale: a mixture selected in advance at one size beats training on all source tasks at every other size we tested. Transfer is thus a property of the data. The map selects the tasks that help and drops the one that interferes: accuracy on the reasoning targets (causal explanation, multi-hop questions and methodological critique) rises by up to 14 percentage points over training on all source tasks.

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