Layer-Informed Fine-Tuning via Three-Stage Functional Segmentation of LLMs

Junning Shao, Siwei Wang, Zhixuan Fang

In recent years, the performance of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks has been remarkable, even surpassing human capabilities on various benchmarks. However, there remains a lack of clear understanding in the academic community regarding how the structure and internal parameters of LLMs progressively solve complex reasoning problems. In this study, we investigate the inference process of LLMs on cross-linguistic materials and propose the hypothesis that LLM layers exhibit a structured division of labor across conceptualization, reasoning, and textualization. Based on this hypothesis, we introduce a bottleneck identification mechanism using sensitivity analysis to pinpoint the most critical functional stage for a specific task. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel approach, Layer-Informed Fine-Tuning (LIFT), which achieves efficient and effective fine-tuning by selectively updating only these functionally critical layers. We then conduct extensive experiments to show that the LIFT method not only accelerates the training process but also significantly improves model performance.