scientific reasoning

Drift-Constrained Optimization: Only Direction Matters in Fine-Tuning Instruct Modelsarxiv.org

The paper reframes fine‑tuning of instruction‑tuned LLMs as a direction‑selection problem under a fixed behavioral‑drift budget, showing that the update direction, not magnitude, determines trade‑offs between target performance and capability preservation. In QA‑only fine‑tuning of Qwen‑3 models, layer‑selective probing finds effective directions that boost scientific reasoning and multilingual t…