Find Before You Fine-Tune: A Diagnostic Study of Small LLMs for Cybersecurity QA
arXiv:2607.18725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned for critical-domain Question-Answering (QA), yet choosing which small model to adapt, before paying the cost of adaptation, remains difficult. Fine-tuning can improve domain alignment, but it may also erode prior knowledge, weaken instruction-following, or increase hallucination, especially when labeled data are scarce or rapidly evolving as in cybersecurity. We present FiT (Find before Fine-