Understanding Layer Significance in LLM Alignment

Abstract: Aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning is essential for tailoring them to specific applications. Recent studies suggest that alignment primarily adjusts a model's presentation style rather than its foundational knowledge, indicating that only certain components of the model are significantly impacted. To uncover how alignment affects model behavior at a granular level, we propose identifying which layers within LLMs are most critical to the alignment process. Our approach, named ILA, involves learning a binary mask for the parameter changes in each layer during alignment, as an indicator of layer significance. Experimental results reveal that, despite substantial differences in alignment datasets, the important layers of a model identified by ILA exhibit nearly 90\% overlap, highlighting fundamental patterns in LLM alignment. The results also indicate that freezing non-essential layers improves overall model performance, while selectively tuning the most critical layers significantly enhances fine-tuning efficiency with minimal performance loss. Finally, we discuss how these findings extend from LLM alignment to reasoning.