Can One Adapted Model Do It All? Fine-Tuning Strategy Selection for Customer Support LLMs

2026-09-22

AI Summary

研究探讨了客户服务LLM的多任务处理策略，通过多任务微调、顺序更新或模型合并的方法，发现多任务全微调在所有测试模型尺寸中表现最佳。

Abstract

Production customer-support systems often require LLMs to support multiple skills, such as intent classification, question answering, summarization, or tool-use decisions. A central deployment question is whether these skills should be handled by separate task-specialist models or by a single model trained through multi-task training, sequential updates, or model merging. We study this question using thirteen models spanning five families (Qwen3, Qwen3.5, Gemma-3, Llama-3.1, and Mistral) from 0.6B to 32B parameters across eight customer-support datasets, spanning four public and four proprietary datasets with approximately 74.5k training and 8.7k evaluation samples. Under a fixed training protocol, we train more than 200 checkpoints. Our experiments reveal that multi-task full fine-tuning is the strongest operational default at every model size we test. Specialist models are strong on their target tasks but often degrade sharply off-task, making reliable routing important. Sequential Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) preserves earlier skills better than sequential full fine-tuning, while merging a specialist with its base model improves off-task robustness with limited same-task loss for larger models. We conclude with practical guidelines for selecting fine-tuning strategies in real-world settings.

Problem

• multi-task training
• sequential updates
• model merging
• customer support
• LLMs

Innovation

• multi-task full fine-tuning
• Sequential Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)
• model merging