Neural Incompatibility: The Unbridgeable Gap of Cross-Scale Parametric Knowledge Transfer in Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a transparent brain with accessible parameters that encode extensive knowledge, which can be analyzed, located and transferred. Consequently, a key research challenge is to transcend traditional knowledge transfer paradigms rooted in symbolic language and achieve genuine Parametric Knowledge Transfer (PKT). Significantly, exploring effective methods for transferring knowledge across LLMs of different scales through parameters presents an intriguing and valuable research direction. In this paper, we first demonstrate $\textbf{Alignment}$ in parametric space is the fundamental prerequisite to achieve successful cross-scale PKT. We redefine the previously explored knowledge transfer as Post-Align PKT (PostPKT), which utilizes extracted parameters for LoRA initialization and requires subsequent fine-tune for alignment. Hence, to reduce cost for further fine-tuning, we introduce a novel Pre-Align PKT (PrePKT) paradigm and propose a solution called $\textbf{LaTen}$ ($\textbf{L}$oc$\textbf{a}$te-$\textbf{T}$h$\textbf{e}$n-Alig$\textbf{n}$) that aligns the parametric spaces of LLMs across scales only using several training steps without following training. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that both PostPKT and PrePKT face challenges in achieving consistently stable transfer. Through in-depth analysis, we identify $\textbf{Neural Incompatibility}$ as the ethological and parametric structural differences between LLMs of varying scales, presenting fundamental challenges to achieving effective PKT. These findings provide fresh insights into the parametric architectures of LLMs and highlight promising directions for future research on efficient PKT. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/Neural_Incompatibility.
Code (1)
Tasks
Transfer LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Beyond Neural Incompatibility: Cross-Scale Knowledge Transfer in Language Models through Latent Semantic Alignment
Language Models (LMs) encode substantial knowledge in their parameters, yet it remains unclear how to transfer such knowledge in a fine-grained manner, namely parametric knowledge transfer (PKT). A central challenge is t…
Seeking Neural Nuggets: Knowledge Transfer in Large Language Models from a Parametric Perspective
Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently encode a wealth of knowledge within their parameters through pre-training on extensive corpora. While prior research has delved into operations on these parameters to manipulate th…
Transfer LearningIs Label Smoothing Truly Incompatible with Knowledge Distillation: An Empirical Study
This work aims to empirically clarify a recently discovered perspective that label smoothing is incompatible with knowledge distillation. We begin by introducing the motivation behind on how this incompatibility is raise…
image-classificationImage ClassificationKnowledge DistillationMachine Translation+1On the comparison of incompatibility of split systems across different numbers of taxa
The concept of $k$-compatibility measures how many phylogenetic trees it would take to display all splits in a given set. A set of trees that display every single possible split is termed a \textit{universal tree set}. I…
Integrating multi-type aberrations from DNA and RNA through dynamic mapping gene space for subtype-specific breast cancer driver discovery
Driver event discovery is a crucial demand for breast cancer diagnosis and therapy. Especially, discovering subtype-specificity of drivers can prompt the personalized biomarker discovery and precision treatment of cancer…
SpecificityVocal Bursts Type Prediction