Learning to Fine-tune Foundation Models under Resource Limitations

Thomas Tsouparopoulos; Iordanis Koutsopoulos

cs.LGJul 12, 2026

Learning to Fine-tune Foundation Models under Resource Limitations

Authors: Thomas Tsouparopoulos, Iordanis Koutsopoulos

Organizations: Department of Informatics Athens University of Economics and Business Athens, Greece

Abstract

We study the problem of optimal continual fine-tuning for a pre-trained Foundation Model deployed at a resource-limited device. At each time slot, a new batch of training data arrives, and the controller is faced with two options: either use the data to fine-tune the model and incur a compute cost, or do not fine-tune the model and discard the data. After the decision, the performance of the current model is measured in terms of an application-specific performance metric such as classification accuracy. Our objective is to learn an optimal policy that determines \emph{when to fine-tune the model} on a single task (e.g., sentiment analysis), under a finite compute budget. We formulate this online decision-making problem as a constrained Markov Decision Process, where the system state captures three essential aspects: (\textit{i}) model's performance, (\textit{ii}) computational budget, and (\textit{iii}) data distribution relevance to historic data encountered up to that point. The transition to the next state is stochastic and therefore, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method to solve this problem, namely the \emph{actor-critic} algorithm. We also consider the special case where the performance of fine-tuning for a given model can be predicted or estimated prior to decision; in this case the problem becomes a Dynamic Programming one. Experiments with a large pre-trained model on a widely-used text classification dataset demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuning approaches with the same compute budget by more than $4\%$ in terms of accuracy and achieves $97\%$ of full-parameter fine-tuning accuracy while requiring only $25\%$ of the fine-tuning steps.

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