Preprint Open access
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides denser token-level supervision and better computational efficiency than Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, this denser supervision may introduce substantial noise and training instability. Existing improvements often rely on high-variance per-toke …
Preprint Open access
Multimodal continual instruction tuning (MCIT) aims to enable multimodal large language models to acquire new capabilities from sequential tasks while preserving previously learned knowledge. Existing methods primarily mitigate catastrophic forgetting by constraining parameter updates or separating task-specific adapta …
Preprint Open access
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative for LLM fine-tuning by estimating updates only from forward evaluations of perturbed parameters, without backpropagation or activation storage. However, in billion-parameter LLMs, isotropic perturbations often waste many forward evaluations on weakly …