Brady Steele
2026
Annotation Entropy Predicts Per-Example Learning Dynamics in LoRA Fine-Tuning
Brady Steele
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Brady Steele
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Annotator disagreement on tasks like natural languageinference (NLI) reflects genuine linguistic ambiguity,yet most fine-tuning recipes treat every example as equallylearnable.We ask whether this external signal of ambiguity predicts*per-example* learning dynamics under LoRA, the most widelyused parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, and find that it does.Correlating annotation entropy (from ChaosNLI’s 100 labels perexample) with per-example area under the loss curve (AULC)on SNLI and MNLI, the correlation is positive in all 25conditions tested (Spearman 𝜌= 0.06-0.43), withdecoder-only models showing stronger correlations thanencoders at matched LoRA rank.More strikingly, under LoRA contested examples exhibit*un-learning*: their gold-label loss *increases*during training, a pattern that is largely absent underfull fine-tuning and IA3 in the encoder setting wherematched comparisons are available, and that we also observeunder LoRA on two decoder-only models.The effect survives partial-correlation controls andreplicates across seeds and datasets.A preliminary noise-injection experiment is consistentwith these findings.