Mechanism
Modifies the SFT forward/loss pass to prevent memorization and improve conversational generation. NEFTune injects uniform random noise scaled by into token embeddings during SFT; Prompt-Loss Weighting adds a small weight on prompt tokens or upweights final-answer / pivotal tokens relative to boilerplate formatting tokens.
Practical Notes
NEFTune significantly increases AlpacaEval win rates when SFT datasets are small and prone to overfitting.
References
- NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning ↗
All 13 authors
Neel Jain, Ping-yeh Chiang, Yuxin Wen, John Kirchenbauer, Hong-Min Chu, Gowthami Somepalli, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Avi Schwarzschild, Aniruddha Saha, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein
- Instruction Tuning With Loss Over Instructions ↗