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This research investigates the effectiveness of alignment techniques, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and a combined SFT+DPO approach on improving the safety and helpfulness of the OPT-350M language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Piyush Pant

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Wenxuan Zhang , Philip H. S. Torr , Mohamed Elhoseiny , Adel Bibi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has revolutionized language modeling by aligning models with human preferences. However, the RL stage, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), requires over 3x the memory of Supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Michael Santacroce , Yadong Lu , Han Yu , Yuanzhi Li , Yelong Shen

Recent studies suggest that Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is inherently more resilient to catastrophic forgetting than Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, whether RFT (e.g., GRPO) can effectively overcome forgetting in challenging…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Meng Lou , Hanzhong Guo , Linwei Chen , Yizhou Yu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a method for enhancing model performance by directly optimizing for the preferences or rankings of outcomes, instead of traditional loss functions. This approach has proven effective in aligning Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Ruoyu Wang , Jiachen Sun , Shaowei Hua , Quan Fang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Chao Xue , Yao Wang , Mengqiao Liu , Di Liang , Xingsheng Han , Peiyang Liu , Xianjie Wu , Chenyao Lu , Lei Jiang , Yu Lu , Haibo Shi , Shuang Liang , Minlong Peng , Flora D. Salim

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Preference learning extends the performance of Code LLMs beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. In existing approaches, a set of n candidate solutions is evaluated based on test case success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jie Wu , Haoling Li , Xin Zhang , Xiao Liu , Yangyu Huang , Jianwen Luo , Yizhen Zhang , Zuchao Li , Ruihang Chu , Yujiu Yang , Scarlett Li

We introduce Stackelberg Learning from Human Feedback (SLHF), a new framework for preference optimization. SLHF frames the alignment problem as a sequential-move game between two policies: a Leader, which commits to an action, and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Barna Pásztor , Thomas Kleine Buening , Andreas Krause

The integration of LLMs into vulnerability detection (VD) has shifted the field toward more interpretable and context-aware analysis. While post-training techniques have shown promise in general coding tasks, their systematic application to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Youpeng Li , Fuxun Yu , Xinda Wang

The training paradigm integrating large language models (LLM) is gradually reshaping sequential recommender systems (SRS) and has shown promising results. However, most existing LLM-enhanced methods rely on rich textual information on the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Dugang Liu , Shenxian Xian , Xiaolin Lin , Xiaolian Zhang , Hong Zhu , Yuan Fang , Zhen Chen , Zhong Ming

Post-training has become essential for adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex downstream behaviors, including instruction following, preference alignment, and multi-step reasoning. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Chengqian Zhang , Wei Zhu , Kyumin Lee

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dawid J. Kopiczko , Sagar Vaze , Tijmen Blankevoort , Yuki M. Asano

Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT) is a standard method for training LLM agents, where unsuccessful trajectories are discarded from the training set. In the context of SWE-bench tasks, this corresponds to filtering out runs where the submitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Igor Slinko , Ilia Zavidnyi , Egor Bogomolov , Yaroslav Zharov

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a pivotal challenge in advancing AI capabilities. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are the dominant training paradigms, a systematic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Hiroshi Yoshihara , Taiki Yamaguchi , Yuichi Inoue

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Dan Shi , Zhuowen Han , Simon Ostermann , Renren Jin , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…