Boosting Large Language Models with Mask Fine-Tuning

Abstract

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce Mask Fine-Tuning (MFT), a novel LLM fine-tuning paradigm demonstrating that carefully breaking the model's structural integrity can surprisingly improve performance without updating model weights. MFT learns and applies binary masks to well-optimized models, using the standard LLM fine-tuning objective as supervision. Based on fully fine-tuned models, MFT uses the same fine-tuning datasets to achieve consistent performance gains across domains and backbones (e.g., an average gain of \textbf{2.70 / 4.15} in IFEval with LLaMA2-7B / 3.1-8B). Detailed ablation studies and analyses examine the proposed MFT from different perspectives, such as sparse ratio and loss surface. Additionally, by deploying it on well-trained models, MFT is compatible with collaborating with other LLM optimization procedures to enhance the general model. Furthermore, this study extends the functionality of the masking operation beyond its conventional network-pruning context for model compression to a broader model capability scope.