# Parameter Importance is Not Static: Evolving Parameter Isolation for Supervised Fine-Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14010/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05974/) (2021)
- [WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08568/) (2023)
- [Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11134/) (2019)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [New insights and perspectives on the natural gradient method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1193/) (2014)
- [In Search of the Real Inductive Bias: On the Role of Implicit Regularization in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6614/) (2014)
- [How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05492/) (2023)
- [ExT5: Towards Extreme Multi-Task Scaling for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10952/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Natural Gradient for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3584/) (2013)
- [TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09174/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Efficient Task Adaptation in Large Language Models via Selective Parameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17051/) (2026)
- [Multi-Granularity Reasoning for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05181/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models often suffers from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches alleviate this issue by isolating task-critical parameters during training. However, these methods represent a static solution to a dynamic problem, assuming that parameter importance remains fixed once identified. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that parameter importance exhibits temporal drift over the course of training. To address this, we propose Evolving Parameter Isolation (EPI), a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. Instead of freezing a fixed subset of parameters, EPI periodically updates isolation masks using gradient-based signals, enabling the model to protect emerging task-critical parameters while releasing outdated ones to recover plasticity. Experiments on diverse multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPI consistently reduces interference and forgetting compared to static isolation and standard fine-tuning, while improving overall generalization. Our analysis highlights the necessity of synchronizing isolation mechanisms with the evolving dynamics of learning diverse abilities.