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Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-16 David McAllister , Miika Aittala , Tero Karras , Janne Hellsten , Angjoo Kanazawa , Timo Aila , Samuli Laine

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Mayank Mishra , Gaurav Pandey , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Li Shen , Jing Bai , Kam-Fai Wong

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable reward, whether large vision-language models (VLMs) can directly inherit such capabilities through similar…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tianle Li , Jihai Zhang , Yongming Rao , Yu Cheng

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation in multiple aspects. However, many medical VLMs rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which optimizes next-token prediction without…

Supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL) are both widely used to train general-purpose agents for complex tasks, yet their generalization capabilities and underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Meng Song

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, with post-training playing a crucial role in enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Among post-training paradigms, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used: it leverages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Lisong Sun , Li Wang , Chen Zhang , Jinyang Wu , Kui Zhang , Tianhao Peng , Wenjun Wu

After the pretraining stage of LLMs, techniques such as SFT, RLHF, RLVR, and RFT are applied to enhance instruction-following ability, mitigate undesired responses, improve reasoning capability and enable efficient domain adaptation with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Zhichao Wang , Andy Wong , Ruslan Belkin

Accurate chart comprehension represents a critical challenge in advancing multimodal learning systems, as extensive information is compressed into structured visual representations. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xin Zhang , Xingyu Li , Rongguang Wang , Ruizhong Miao , Zheng Wang , Dan Roth , Chenyang Li

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Zhang , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yuqian Fu , Tinghong Chen , Jiajun Chai , Xihuai Wang , Songjun Tu , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Pratham Singla , Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Ishan Garg , Ketan Suhaas Saichandran

In order for autonomous mobile robots to navigate in human spaces, they must abide by our social norms. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method to train sequential decision-making policies that are able to respect…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Adam Sigal , Hsiu-Chin Lin , AJung Moon

Some reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can stitch pieces of experience to solve a task never seen before during training. This oft-sought property is one of the few ways in which RL methods based on dynamic-programming differ from RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Raj Ghugare , Matthieu Geist , Glen Berseth , Benjamin Eysenbach