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How can I reduce overfitting when fine-tuning a large language model?
Asked on Jan 08, 2026
Answer
To reduce overfitting when fine-tuning a large language model, you can employ several strategies that help the model generalize better to unseen data.
Example Concept: Overfitting occurs when a model learns the training data too well, including its noise and outliers, resulting in poor performance on new data. To mitigate this, techniques such as regularization, dropout, early stopping, and data augmentation can be used. Regularization adds a penalty to the loss function to discourage overly complex models. Dropout randomly deactivates neurons during training to prevent co-adaptation. Early stopping monitors validation performance and halts training when performance degrades. Data augmentation involves increasing the diversity of the training data without collecting new data.
Additional Comment:
- Regularization techniques like L2 (weight decay) can help by penalizing large weights.
- Dropout layers can be added to the model architecture to improve robustness.
- Early stopping should be based on validation loss to avoid overfitting.
- Data augmentation can include techniques like synonym replacement or back-translation for text data.
- Ensure you have a sufficiently large and diverse dataset to train on.
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