Latent Knowledge as a Predictor of Fact Acquisition in Fine-Tuned Large Language Models
Large language models store biomedical facts with uneven strength after pretraining: some facts are present in the weights but are not reliably accessible under deterministic decoding (latent knowledge), while others are scarcely represented. We fine tuned Llama 3.1 8B Instruct to learn ontology term identifier mappings from the Human Phenotype Ontology (800 pairs) and the Gene Ontology (400 training pairs), withholding 400 GO pairs to test generalization. Treating learning as a time to event process across 20 epochs, we used stochastic decoding to detect latent knowledge at baseline and Cox proportional hazards models to identify predictors of acquisition, generalization, and degradation. Baseline deterministic recall for HPO was 2.8%, rising to 71.9% after fine-tuning. Latent knowledge was the strongest predictor of faster fact acquisition (HR 2.6) and was associated with earlier, higher peak learning rates and faster convergence; identifier frequency and curated annotation counts had smaller effects. Generalization to withheld GO facts was uncommon (5.8%) but more likely when latent knowledge was present. Previously correct GO mappings degraded more often for withheld (unseen) terms than for trained (seen) terms, suggesting a protective effect of reinforcement during training. These results show that latent knowledge predicts both the speed of factual learning during fine-tuning and the limited generalization of unseen ontology facts, while resistance to degradation depends on whether facts are reinforced.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Provable Knowledge Acquisition and Extraction in One-Layer Transformers
Large language models may encounter factual knowledge during pre-training yet fail to reliably use that knowledge after fine-tuning. Despite growing empirical evidence that MLP layers store factual associations and fine-…
Towards Dynamic Computation Graphs via Sparse Latent Structure
Deep NLP models benefit from underlying structures in the data---e.g., parse trees---typically extracted using off-the-shelf parsers. Recent attempts to jointly learn the latent structure encounter a tradeoff: either mak…
graph constructionKnowledge-Based Zero-Replay Debugging of Multi-Agent LLM Traces
Reliable operation of multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems depends on debugging long execution traces, where the few causally decisive events are buried in unstructured logs of messages, routes, memory writes, …
Ranking and Combining Latent Structured Predictive Scores without Labeled Data
Combining multiple predictors obtained from distributed data sources to an accurate meta-learner is promising to achieve enhanced performance in lots of prediction problems. As the accuracy of each predictor is usually u…
Ensemble LearningProsodic Features from Large Corpora of Child-Directed Speech as Predictors of the Age of Acquisition of Words
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predict…