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Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, and common post-training pipelines often reduce each generated solution to a binary outcome: correct or incorrect. This perspective is limiting in practice, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haocheng Lu , Minjun Zhu , Henry Yu

Training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning via maths and code datasets has become a major new focus in LLM post-training. Two particularly popular approaches are reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Neel Rajani , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Shweta Singh , Paras Chopra

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

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks. We present Reinforcement Learning from Self-Feedback (RLSF), a post-training stage that uses the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Carel van Niekerk , Renato Vukovic , Benjamin Matthias Ruppik , Hsien-chin Lin , Milica Gašić

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Kaiyuan Chen , Jin Wang , Xuejie Zhang

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to train large language models (LLMs). However, it is unclear whether LLMs accurately learn the underlying preferences in human feedback data. We coin the term \textit{Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Luke Marks , Amir Abdullah , Clement Neo , Rauno Arike , David Krueger , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

Post-training methods, especially Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), play an important role in improving large language models' (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities. However, the dominant two-stage pipeline (SFT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Mingyu Su , Jian Guan , Yuxian Gu , Minlie Huang , Hongning Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Qi Gou , Cam-Tu Nguyen

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models (LMs) with human preferences post pre-training. While SFT excels in efficiency and PO in effectiveness, they are often combined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ermo Hua , Biqing Qi , Kaiyan Zhang , Kai Tian , Xingtai Lv , Ning Ding , Bowen Zhou

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a variant of reinforcement learning (RL) that learns from human feedback instead of relying on an engineered reward function. Building on prior work on the related setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Timo Kaufmann , Paul Weng , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through…