Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents
Summary
This paper investigates failures in a 2B model for dialogue games and introduces a diagnosis-guided post-training recipe using SFT, DPO, and LoRA to boost performance while maintaining general capabilities.
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Paper page - Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2608.28458 We study why a 2B model fails at interactive dialogue games, and find the failures are not only missing knowledge but local decision errors — repeated guesses, malformed actions, violations of feedback the model just saw. Since these are mechanically checkable, we place supervision exactly there: broad SFT to acquire game participation, turn-local DPO pairs (same history, one corrupted decision) to repair diagnosed failures in a single game family, and training-free scaling of the learned LoRA delta to preserve general capability.
Official final evaluation: public clemscore 10.67 → 38.92, closed in-domain 13.41 → 41.17 (above the 4B and 9B baselines), with static performance approximately preserved (44.14 vs. 44.24). Out-of-domain remains low at 7.88 — transfer is concentrated within the targeted family.
Model:https://huggingface.co/chnln/Qwen3.5-2B-playpen-playornotplay
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