Weiran Xu

h-index2
2papers
139citations

2 Papers

7.5LGJan 5
Entropy-Adaptive Fine-Tuning: Resolving Confident Conflicts to Mitigate Forgetting

Muxi Diao, Lele Yang, Wuxuan Gong et al.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities. We investigate this discrepancy and identify a fundamental distributional gap: while RL aligns with the model's internal belief, SFT forces the model to fit external supervision. This mismatch often manifests as "Confident Conflicts" tokens characterized by low probability but low entropy. In these instances, the model is highly confident in its own prediction but is forced to learn a divergent ground truth, triggering destructive gradient updates. To address this, we propose Entropy-Adaptive Fine-Tuning (EAFT). Unlike methods relying solely on prediction probability, EAFT utilizes token-level entropy as a gating mechanism to distinguish between epistemic uncertainty and knowledge conflict. This allows the model to learn from uncertain samples while suppressing gradients on conflicting data. Extensive experiments on Qwen and GLM series (ranging from 4B to 32B parameters) across mathematical, medical, and agentic domains confirm our hypothesis. EAFT consistently matches the downstream performance of standard SFT while significantly mitigating the degradation of general capabilities.

5.5CLFeb 17, 2024
Multi-Perspective Consistency Enhances Confidence Estimation in Large Language Models

Pei Wang, Yejie Wang, Muxi Diao et al.

In the deployment of large language models (LLMs), accurate confidence estimation is critical for assessing the credibility of model predictions. However, existing methods often fail to overcome the issue of overconfidence on incorrect answers. In this work, we focus on improving the confidence estimation of large language models. Considering the fragility of self-awareness in language models, we introduce a Multi-Perspective Consistency (MPC) method. We leverage complementary insights from different perspectives within models (MPC-Internal) and across different models (MPC-Across) to mitigate the issue of overconfidence arising from a singular viewpoint. The experimental results on eight publicly available datasets show that our MPC achieves state-of-the-art performance. Further analyses indicate that MPC can mitigate the problem of overconfidence and is effectively scalable to other models.