Tao Liu
Unverified author pages with similar names: Tao Liu
2026
ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection
Tao Liu | Taiqiang Wu | Runming Yang | Shaoning Sun | Junjie Wang | Yujiu Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Tao Liu | Taiqiang Wu | Runming Yang | Shaoning Sun | Junjie Wang | Yujiu Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single reference answer, leading to the model overfitting to non-core expressions. Although our empirical analysis suggests that introducing multiple reference answers can mitigate this issue, the prohibitive data and computational costs necessitate a strategic shift: prioritizing the mitigation of single-reference overfitting over the costly pursuit of answer diversity. To achieve this, we reveal the intrinsic connection between token probability and semantic importance: high-probability tokens carry the core logical framework, while low-probability tokens are mostly replaceable expressions. Based on this insight, we propose ProFit, which selectively masks low-probability tokens to prevent surface-level overfitting. Extensive experiments confirm that ProFit consistently outperforms traditional SFT baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks
Revisiting Model Interpolation for Efficient Reasoning
Taiqiang Wu | Runming Yang | Tao Liu | Jiahao Wang | Ngai Wong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taiqiang Wu | Runming Yang | Tao Liu | Jiahao Wang | Ngai Wong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Model merging, typically on Instruct and Thinking models, has shown remarkable performance for efficient reasoning. In this paper, we systematically revisit the simplest merging method that interpolates two weights directly. Particularly, we observe that model interpolation follows a three-stage evolutionary paradigm with distinct behaviors on the reasoning trajectory. These dynamics provide a principled guide for navigating the performance-cost trade-off. Empirical results demonstrate that a strategically interpolated model surprisingly surpasses sophisticated model merging baselines on both efficiency and effectiveness. We further validate our findings with extensive ablation studies on model layers, modules, and decoding strategies. Ultimately, this work demystifies model interpolation and offers a practical framework for crafting models with precisely targeted reasoning capabilities.