arXiv · 2506.21220
Complexity-aware fine-tuning
Abstract
General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently fine-tuned through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance performance in specific domains. Better results can be achieved by distilling the chain-of-thought of a larger model at the cost of numerous expensive calls and a much greater amount of data. We propose a novel blueprint for efficient fine-tuning that uses reasoning only for complex data identified by entropy. Specifically, across three small open models ($\approx 3B$) we split the training data into complexity categories by a single token answer entropy (ROC AUC $0.73$), fine-tune large language models (LLMs) via SFT and distillation, and show that our pipeline significantly outperforms the standard SFT approach ($0.58$ vs $0.45$ average accuracy) and outperforms the distillation approach ($0.58$ vs $0.56$ average accuracy) while using $81\%$ less data.
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Andrey Goncharov, Daniil Vyazhev, Petr Sychev, Edvard Khalafyan, Alexey Zaytsev. 2025-06-26. Complexity-aware fine-tuning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21220
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