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Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

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TL;DR - Controlled experiments on multi-domain mid-training find that moderate coverage of each reasoning domain—roughly 10%–40%—outperforms extreme allocations. Subsequent supervised alignment improves overall accuracy but generally cannot repair domain gaps created during mid-training.

  • All five KOR-Bench domains exhibited interior coverage optima; fitted Qwen3-8B peaks ranged from 9.9% to 35.1%.
  • A fixed-budget SFT pass improved 116 of 120 evaluated cells by 4.32% on average, yet bridged none of 240 performance gaps at a 5% threshold and only 30 at 10%.
  • Omitting a domain caused mid-training accuracy to collapse, although a FineWeb-Edu control indicates that generic distributional drift partly confounds this result.
  • An exploratory optimized allocation produced the largest full-pipeline gain (+4.36 percentage points), but its advantage was only marginal under a Welch test.

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Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

arXiv cs.AI Yunpeng Xu, Kun Zheng 2026-09-08 arXiv:2609.09081
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-14 14:10:33.509426 UTC

TL;DR - Controlled experiments on multi-domain mid-training find that moderate coverage of each reasoning domain—roughly 10%–40%—outperforms extreme allocations. Subsequent supervised alignment improves overall accuracy but generally cannot repair domain gaps created during mid-training.

  • All five KOR-Bench domains exhibited interior coverage optima; fitted Qwen3-8B peaks ranged from 9.9% to 35.1%.
  • A fixed-budget SFT pass improved 116 of 120 evaluated cells by 4.32% on average, yet bridged none of 240 performance gaps at a 5% threshold and only 30 at 10%.
  • Omitting a domain caused mid-training accuracy to collapse, although a FineWeb-Edu control indicates that generic distributional drift partly confounds this result.
  • An exploratory optimized allocation produced the largest full-pipeline gain (+4.36 percentage points), but its advantage was only marginal under a Welch test.
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