Agent Fine-tuning through Distillation for Domain-specific LLMs in Microdomains

Agentic large language models (LLMs) have become prominent for autonomously interacting with external environments and performing multi-step reasoning tasks. Most approaches leverage these capabilities via in-context learning with few-shot prompts, but this often results in lengthy inputs and higher computational costs. Agent fine-tuning offers an alternative by enabling LLMs to internalize procedural reasoning and domain-specific knowledge through training on relevant data and demonstration trajectories. While prior studies have focused on general domains, their effectiveness in specialized technical microdomains remains unclear. This paper explores agent fine-tuning for domain adaptation within Hitachi's JP1 middleware, a microdomain for specialized IT operations. We fine-tuned LLMs using JP1-specific datasets derived from domain manuals and distilled reasoning trajectories generated by LLMs themselves, enhancing decision making accuracy and search efficiency. During inference, we used an agentic prompt with retrieval-augmented generation and introduced a context-answer extractor to improve information relevance. On JP1 certification exam questions, our method achieved a 14% performance improvement over the base model, demonstrating the potential of agent fine-tuning for domain-specific reasoning in complex microdomains.

GFlowNet Fine-tuning for Diverse Correct Solutions in Mathematical Reasoning Tasks

Mathematical reasoning problems are among the most challenging, as they typically require an understanding of fundamental laws to solve. The laws are universal, but the derivation of the final answer changes depending on how a problem is approached. When training large language models (LLMs), learning the capability of generating such multiple solutions is essential to accelerate their use in mathematical education. To this end, we train LLMs using generative flow network (GFlowNet). Different from reward-maximizing reinforcement learning (RL), GFlowNet fine-tuning seeks to find diverse solutions by training the LLM whose distribution is proportional to a reward function. In numerical experiments, we evaluate GFlowNet fine-tuning and reward-maximizing RL in terms of accuracy and diversity. The results show that GFlowNet fine-tuning derives correct final answers from diverse intermediate reasoning steps, indicating the improvement of the capability of alternative solution generation.

Team Hitachi at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Exploring Cross-lingual Multi-task Strategies for Genre and Framing Detection in Online News

This paper explains the participation of team Hitachi to SemEval-2023 Task 3 "Detecting the genre, the framing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multi-lingual setup." Based on the multilingual, multi-task nature of the task and the setting that training data is limited, we investigated different strategies for training the pretrained language models under low resource settings. Through extensive experiments, we found that (a) cross-lingual/multi-task training, and (b) collecting an external balanced dataset, can benefit the genre and framing detection. We constructed ensemble models from the results and achieved the highest macro-averaged F1 scores in Italian and Russian genre categorization subtasks.