Related papers: SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study…

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) reliably improves the reasoning performance of large language models, yet it appears to modify only a small fraction of parameters. We revisit this paradox and show that sparsity is a…

Strong reasoning capabilities can now be achieved by large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without any supervised fine-tuning. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are well studied in the context…

Understanding generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) is a significant challenge, as many common assumptions of traditional supervised learning theory do not apply. We focus on the special class of reparameterizable RL problems, where…

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) often need to be tailored for specific applications, requiring the integration of new knowledge or the acquisition of new skills. While full fine-tuning is a powerful adaptation…

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) enjoys several benefits, such as data-efficiency and planning, by learning a model of the environment's dynamics. However, learning a global model that can generalize across different dynamics is a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in question answering (QA), but metrics for assessing their reliance on memorization versus retrieval remain underdeveloped. Moreover, while finetuned models are…

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…

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Previous research has sought to enhance the graph reasoning capabilities of LLMs by supervised fine-tuning on synthetic graph data. While these led to specialized LLMs better at solving graph algorithm problems, we don't need LLMs for…

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) benefits Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning. Inspired by this, we explore integrating spatio-temporal specific rewards into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to address the unique…

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) advances for Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved reasoning tasks, yet their resource-constrained application to medical imaging remains underexplored. We introduce ChexReason, a vision-language…

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach for improving the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) system. However, due to its instability, successfully RL training is challenging,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in LLM reasoning, but whether it can also improve direct recall of parametric knowledge remains an open question. We study this question in a controlled zero-shot, one-hop,…

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…