arXiv:2611.17072v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Fine-tuning foundation models on financial data has a wide range of applications, including identifying event types from news, monitoring risk and compliance language, and answering questions over filings and earnings calls. In this setting, the main challenge is to improve task performance without degrading the generalization capabilities of the model. In this paper, we present an extensive set of ablations for fine-tuning Qwen3-8B with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). We compare three training regimes: (1) response-only LoRA, where the supervised response is the label alone; (2) single-adapter reasoning, where reasoning traces from a teacher model are included alongside the labels in the training loss; and (3) dual-adapter composite training, where separate LoRA adapters are trained on traces and labels. Response-only LoRA improves in-domain performance and leaves general capabilities near those of the frozen model. The in-domain change is largest for calibration and argmax accuracy. Under single-adapter reasoning, the in-domain metrics remain behind those of the response-only regime, while MMLU-Pro can rise slightly and the other retention benchmarks stay within ordinary variation. Dual-adapter composite training remains on the same side of this comparison and yields no further gain. Finally, we compress the teacher traces by summarizing them before training, and show that shorter summaries move calibration toward the response-only regime without reaching it.
Abstract: Fine-tuning foundation models on financial data has a wide range of applications, including identifying event types from news, monitoring risk and compliance language, and answering questions over filings and earnings calls. In this setting, the main challenge is to improve task performance without degrading the generalization capabilities of the model. In this paper, we present an extensive set of ablations for fine-tuning Qwen3-8B with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). We compare three training regimes: (1) response-only LoRA, where the supervised response is the label alone; (2) single-adapter reasoning, where reasoning traces from a teacher model are included alongside the labels in the training loss; and (3) dual-adapter composite training, where separate LoRA adapters are trained on traces and labels. Response-only LoRA improves in-domain performance and leaves general capabilities near those of the frozen model. The in-domain change is largest for calibration and argmax accuracy. Under single-adapter reasoning, the in-domain metrics remain behind those of the response-only regime, while MMLU-Pro can rise slightly and the other retention benchmarks stay within ordinary variation. Dual-adapter composite training remains on the same side of this comparison and yields no further gain. Finally, we compress the teacher traces by summarizing them before training, and show that shorter summaries move calibration toward the response-only regime without reaching it.
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