Yusuke Yamauchi
2025
Massive Supervised Fine-tuning Experiments Reveal How Data, Layer, and Training Factors Shape LLM Alignment Quality
Yuto Harada
|
Yusuke Yamauchi
|
Yusuke Oda
|
Yohei Oseki
|
Yusuke Miyao
|
Yu Takagi
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a critical step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human instructions and values, yet many aspects of SFT remain poorly understood. We trained a wide range of base models on a variety of datasets including code generation, mathematical reasoning, and general-domain tasks, resulting in 1,000+ SFT models under controlled conditions. We then identified the dataset properties that matter most and examined the layer-wise modifications introduced by SFT.Our findings reveal that some training–task synergies persist across all models while others vary substantially, emphasizing the importance of model-specific strategies. Moreover, we demonstrate that perplexity consistently predicts SFT effectiveness, often surpassing superficial similarity between the training data and the benchmark, and that mid-layer weight changes correlate most strongly with performance gains. We release these 1,000+ SFT models and benchmark results to accelerate further research. All resources are available at https://github.com/llm-jp/massive-sft.