# Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Limited Data: A Survey and Practical Guide

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09539 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09539/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 175 of its 237 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 175)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [Modeling Challenging Patient Interactions: LLMs for Medical Communication Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22250/) (2025)
- [DONOD: Efficient and Generalizable Instruction Fine-Tuning for LLMs via Model-Intrinsic Dataset Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14810/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27859/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective adaptation under data scarcity requires focused and efficient fine-tuning techniques. This paper presents a structured and practical survey of recent methods for fine-tuning LLMs in data-scarce scenarios. We systematically review parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques that lower training and deployment costs, domain and cross-lingual adaptation methods for both encoder and decoder models, and model specialization strategies. We further examine preference alignment approaches that guide model behavior using limited human or synthetic feedback, emphasizing sample and compute efficiency. Throughout, we highlight empirical trade-offs, selection criteria, and best practices for choosing suitable techniques based on task constraints, including model scaling, data scaling, and the mitigation of catastrophic forgetting. The aim is to equip researchers and practitioners with actionable insights for effectively fine-tuning LLMs when data and resources are limited.