@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2025-analyzing,
    title = "Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of {SFT} via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns",
    author = "Zhao, Yang  and
      Du, Li  and
      Ding, Xiao  and
      Xiong, Kai  and
      Liu, Ting  and
      Qin, Bing",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.831/",
    pages = "16980--16992",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "LLMs' performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the contrary, a prominent phenomenon is that LLMs can learn rather fast on simpler tasks with adequate prior knowledge captured during pretraining stage. Thus, if the prerequisite and mechanism of such rapid generalization could be elucidated, it could enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the LLM{'}s ability to learn complex tasks. Thus, in this paper, we employ a gradient-based method, to dissect the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. We find that: (1) LLMs selectively activate task-specific attention heads during SFT; (2) activation patterns for complex tasks are combinations of basic task patterns; and (3) changes in a few parameters can significantly impact activation patterns after SFT on a small number of samples.Based on these insights, experiments are conducted to actually enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of SFT."
}