Memory-Retaining Finetuning via Distillation

This paper was accepted at the Fine-Tuning in Modern Machine Learning: Principles and Scalability (FITML) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on large corpora of internet text possess much of the world’s knowledge. Following pretraining, one often needs to conduct continued pretraining on certain capabilities, such as math and coding, or “posttraining” (a.k.a., alignment) techniques to make the models follow users’ instructions and align them with human preferences. One challenge during these finetuning stages is that the model can lose the pretraining knowledge…Apple Machine Learning Research