Representation-Aligned Auxiliary Supervision for Language Model Adaptation

Kyuyoung Kim; Peiyao Sheng; Ashwin Hebbar; Peiyang Xu; Yunfei Xie; Kevin Wang; Rui Xin; Chen Wei; Zhangyang Wang; Jinwoo Shin; Pramod Viswanath; Sewoong Oh

arXiv · 2610.04098

Representation-Aligned Auxiliary Supervision for Language Model Adaptation

Kyuyoung Kim·Peiyao Sheng·Ashwin Hebbar·Peiyang Xu·Yunfei Xie·Kevin Wang·Rui Xin·Chen Wei·Zhangyang Wang·Jinwoo Shin·Pramod Viswanath·Sewoong Oh

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet adapting them to structured domains remains challenging and can yield inconsistent outcomes. We identify representation compatibility, the extent to which a model effectively processes a representation for a structured task, as a key factor in adaptation. We study this in chess, which provides a controlled testbed with precise semantics, computable optimal actions, and multiple state representations, including a symbolic encoding (FEN) and a spatial format (ASCII). We find that models often process semantically equivalent inputs substantially differently, affecting both learning and generalization. Building on this observation, we propose representation-aligned auxiliary supervision, which uses environment-derived tasks expressed in compatible representations to improve adaptation to structured domains. Across models and representations, auxiliary supervision consistently improves optimal-move prediction relative to target-only training under identical target data. Tasks that expose environment dynamics provide larger and most consistent gains than surface-level or static supervision, while remaining competitive with substantially increasing the amount of target-task data. Moreover, ASCII-trained models transfer more effectively to FEN than FEN-trained models do to ASCII, even surpassing the FEN target-only baseline on FEN evaluation. The gains also extend beyond optimal-move prediction to open-ended, factually grounded commentary generation. Overall, our results show that auxiliary supervision in model-compatible representations can enable effective adaptation in structured domains.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL cs.LG

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Kyuyoung Kim, Peiyao Sheng, Ashwin Hebbar, Peiyang Xu, Yunfei Xie, Kevin Wang, Rui Xin, Chen Wei, Zhangyang Wang, Jinwoo Shin, Pramod Viswanath, Sewoong Oh. 2026-10-24. Representation-Aligned Auxiliary Supervision for Language Model Adaptation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04098

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

STAPO: Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning for LLMs by Silencing Rare Spurious Tokens

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly improved large language model reasoning, but existing RL fine-tuning methods rely heavily on heuristic techniques such as entropy regularization and reweighting to maintain stability. In practice, they often suffer from late-stage performance collapse, leading to degraded reasoning quality and unstable training. We identify a key factor behind this instability: a small fraction of tokens, termed spurious tokens (around 0.01%), which contribute little to the reasoning outcome but receive disproportionately amplified gradient updates due to inheriting the full sequence-level reward. We present a unified framework for evaluating token-level optimization impacts across spurious risk, gradient norms, and entropy changes. Building on the analysis of token characteristics that severely disrupt optimization, we propose the Silencing Spurious Tokens (S2T) mechanism to efficiently suppress their gradient perturbations. Incorporating this mechanism into a group-based objective, we propose Spurious-Token-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), which promotes stable and effective large-scale model refinement. Across six mathematical benchmarks and three model scales, STAPO consistently demonstrates superior entropy stability and achieves average accuracy improvements over baselines including GRPO, 20-Entropy, and JustRL under two widely-adopted evaluation settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

What You See Is What You Get: Observation-Aligned Supervision for Chart-to-Code Generation

Chart-to-code generation is commonly trained through supervised fine-tuning on reference plotting scripts, implicitly treating the gold code as a fully observable target. However, many chart programs contain latent variables that cannot be uniquely recovered from the rendered image. We identify this latent-observation mismatch in four forms across five chart types: aggregation-induced mismatch, where raw samples are reduced to box statistics or histogram bin masses; normalization-induced mismatch, where absolute scale is removed in pie charts; projection-induced mismatch, where 3D information is lost through 2D rendering; and level-set-induced mismatch, where a scalar field is observable only through selected contour lines. These mismatches introduce target ambiguity and require models to generate information unsupported by the image. We propose Observation-Aligned Supervision, which replaces latent variables with visually constrained quantities. And we study fixed-view 3D scatter and contour charts through controlled experiments. Across VLMs, observation-aligned supervision generally improves observable recovery end-to-end and under both-executable evaluation. Against compact analytic contour formulas, end-to-end performance declines despite better conditional boundary recovery in both-exec setting, suggesting a trade-off with representational compactness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Budget-Aware Compression Pipeline for Single-GPU LLM Inference: Methods, Trade-offs, and Coupling Effects

Single-GPU deployment of 70B-parameter language models on an NVIDIA GPU is constrained by device memory, long-context throughput, and engineering integration cost. We cast single-GPU inference as a budget-aware design problem over these three axes and study how pruning, quantization, and KV-cache compression interact under realistic execution. Controlled ablations show that layer-wise pruning makes weight quantization more robust. KV-cache sparsification complements INT8 KV quantization by reducing memory without hurting decoding speed, while static vector quantizers often conflict with dynamic caching. Guided by these coupling results and explicit budget tracking, we assembled a practical pipeline and compressed a 70B model to about 33 GB, sustained about 57 tokens/s on 10k token prompts on a single A40, and kept absolute accuracy within 5% on common and reasoning benchmarks. We contribute design rules and a reproducible evaluation protocol that jointly report quality, memory, and end-to-end speed, and we provide a foundation for automated pipeline search under realistic single-GPU constraints.

cs.CL↗