@inproceedings{yang-etal-2024-self,
title = "Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning",
author = "Yang, Zhaorui and
Pang, Tianyu and
Feng, Haozhe and
Wang, Han and
Chen, Wei and
Zhu, Minfeng and
Liu, Qian",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.58",
pages = "1028--1043",
abstract = "The surge in Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, but fine-tuning them for specific tasks often encounters challenges in balancing performance and preserving general instruction-following abilities. In this paper, we posit that the distribution gap between task datasets and the LLMs serves as the primary underlying cause. To address the problem, we introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a novel approach that bridges the distribution gap by guiding fine-tuning with a distilled dataset generated by the model itself to match its original distribution. Experimental results on the Llama-2-chat model across various benchmarks demonstrate that SDFT effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting while achieving comparable or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the vanilla fine-tuning. Moreover, SDFT demonstrates the potential to maintain the helpfulness and safety alignment of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/sdft.",
}
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<abstract>The surge in Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, but fine-tuning them for specific tasks often encounters challenges in balancing performance and preserving general instruction-following abilities. In this paper, we posit that the distribution gap between task datasets and the LLMs serves as the primary underlying cause. To address the problem, we introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a novel approach that bridges the distribution gap by guiding fine-tuning with a distilled dataset generated by the model itself to match its original distribution. Experimental results on the Llama-2-chat model across various benchmarks demonstrate that SDFT effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting while achieving comparable or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the vanilla fine-tuning. Moreover, SDFT demonstrates the potential to maintain the helpfulness and safety alignment of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/sdft.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning
%A Yang, Zhaorui
%A Pang, Tianyu
%A Feng, Haozhe
%A Wang, Han
%A Chen, Wei
%A Zhu, Minfeng
%A Liu, Qian
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand
%F yang-etal-2024-self
%X The surge in Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, but fine-tuning them for specific tasks often encounters challenges in balancing performance and preserving general instruction-following abilities. In this paper, we posit that the distribution gap between task datasets and the LLMs serves as the primary underlying cause. To address the problem, we introduce Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT), a novel approach that bridges the distribution gap by guiding fine-tuning with a distilled dataset generated by the model itself to match its original distribution. Experimental results on the Llama-2-chat model across various benchmarks demonstrate that SDFT effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting while achieving comparable or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the vanilla fine-tuning. Moreover, SDFT demonstrates the potential to maintain the helpfulness and safety alignment of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/sdft.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.58
%P 1028-1043
Markdown (Informal)
[Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning](https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.58) (Yang et al., ACL 2024)
ACL
- Zhaorui Yang, Tianyu Pang, Haozhe Feng, Han Wang, Wei Chen, Minfeng Zhu, and Qian Liu. 2024. Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1028–1043, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.