Chunkang Zhang


2025

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AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations
Xinyu Lu | Dong Xu | Chunkang Zhang | Xinyan Guan | Junxiang Wang | Qingyu Zhang | Pengbo Wang | Yingzhi Mao | Hao Xiang | Xueru Wen | Zichao Li | Yaojie Lu | Hongyu Lin | Le Sun | Xianpei Han
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Automated Alignment refers to a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention. However, it faces challenges such as algorithmic diversity and excessively convoluted workflows. We present AutoAlign, an open-source toolkit that offers:(1) a unified framework integrating mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface, and(2) an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis, automatic alignment signal construction, and iterative model training. Our toolkit enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components. It includes implementations for both highly efficient inference and training, as well as low-resource training. By standardizing automated alignment methodologies and providing accessible implementations, AutoAlign lowers the barriers to building customized aligned models and supports academic research.

2024

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Pattern Shifting or Knowledge Losing? A Forgetting Perspective for Understanding the Effect of Instruction Fine-Tuning
Chunkang Zhang | Boxi Cao | Yaojie Lu | Hongyu Lin | Liu Cao | Ke Zeng | Guanglu Wan | Xunliang Cai | Xianpei Han | Le Sun
Proceedings of the 23rd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Main Conference)

“Instruction Fine-Tuning(IFT) emerges as an essential step of training large language models torobustly carry out tasks of interest. However, there lacks a systematic investigation about theunderlying mechanisms of instruction fine-tuning, particularly on the forgetting phenomenonafter IFT, known as alignment tax. Therefore, to understand the mechanism of IFT from theforgetting perspective, we investigate the alternation of the text pattern and knowledge withinmodels throughout the entire IFT process. Specifically, we restore fine-tuned models to their baseversion by training them on the data sharing a similar distribution with the pre-training corpusand compare their results Our experiment indicates that there is a stage transition of forgettingduring IFT process: (1) Pseudo Forgetting: in this stage, models mainly shift their familiar textpattern away from pre-training data format while the world knowledge is preserved. Consequently,models will recover to their original performance when they are restored to the base version. (2)Actual Forgetting: in this stage, models forget the acquired knowledge as well. Therefore, theyfail to reach the original performance even if they are restored to the base version.”