Assessing the Macro and Micro Effects of Random Seeds on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models

Nghia Tuan Bui, Guergana K Savova, Lijing Wang


Abstract
The impact of random seeds in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has been largely overlooked despite its potential influence on model performance. In this study, we systematically evaluate the effects of random seeds on LLMs using the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. We analyze the macro impact through traditional metrics like accuracy and F1, calculating their mean and variance to quantify performance fluctuations. To capture the micro effects, we introduce a novel metric, consistency, measuring the stability of individual predictions across runs. Our experiments reveal significant variance at both macro and micro levels, underscoring the need for careful consideration of random seeds in fine-tuning and evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-short.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
41–46
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nghia Tuan Bui, Guergana K Savova, and Lijing Wang. 2025. Assessing the Macro and Micro Effects of Random Seeds on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 41–46, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Macro and Micro Effects of Random Seeds on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (Bui et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.3.pdf