12.2LGJul 28
MemSFT: Mitigating Alignment Tax with an External Parametric MemoryJiarui Wang, Xiang Shi, Jiaqi Cao et al.
Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains often incurs an alignment tax, as fine-tuning on domain-specific tasks can cause catastrophic forgetting and substantially degrade performance on general tasks. We propose MemSFT, which mitigates the alignment tax by decoupling domain specialization from backbone parameter updates through a plug-and-play parametric memory. The memory is trained to imitate the behavior of a non-parametric retriever operating over domain data, thereby memorizing knowledge and patterns that would otherwise be accessed through retrieval. Once trained on a specific domain, the memory can be reused across LLMs of different sizes. During generation, a learned router dynamically fuses the output distributions of the memory and backbone at each decoding step, allowing domain expertise to be invoked selectively. Across biology, geoscience, and law, evaluations with models ranging from Qwen3-8B to Qwen3-235B-A22B show that MemSFT consistently improves domain performance with negligible degradation in general performance, whereas full SFT suffers severe forgetting on general tasks. Overall, our results demonstrate a practical path to decoupling general model capabilities from domain-specific knowledge at the parameter level, thereby equipping LLMs with new specialized capabilities without compromising their general capabilities.
4.3LGJul 28
DynaBridge: Dynamic Summary-Guided Cross-Task Multimodal Fusion for DASS-Structured Mental Health AssessmentShiyu Teng, Haichen Yu, Jiaqing Liu et al.
Multimodal behavioral analysis offers a scalable approach to assessing depression, anxiety, and stress, yet generic fusion models often ignore the psychometric structure of questionnaire labels. In DASS-21, risk labels are derived from ordered symptom items through fixed item-to-subscale mappings. We propose \textbf{DynaBridge}, a dynamic summary-guided cross-task multimodal framework for DASS-structured mental health assessment. DynaBridge encodes acoustic, visual, and textual cues across multiple sessions and augments them with frozen-LLM-generated DASS-aware summaries as participant-level semantic evidence. It predicts ordinal item distributions, reconstructs depression, anxiety, and stress risk evidence from item-level soft scores, and fuses this evidence with direct multimodal risk predictions. A confidence-aware refinement strategy further incorporates high-confidence semantic cues conservatively. On the official AdoDAS validation split, DynaBridge outperforms the official baseline and representative multimodal methods, achieving 0.5012 mean F1 for D/A/S risk prediction and 0.3216 mean QWK for DASS-21 item prediction. These results show the value of bridging multimodal cues, semantic summaries, and DASS-21 psychometric structure.