Papers › Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning

Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning

21 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.13669archive 2025-07-28

Zhaorui Yang, Tianyu Pang, Haozhe Feng, Han Wang, Wei Chen, Minfeng Zhu, Qian Liu

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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