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

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Fine-tuning speech representation models can enhance performance on specific tasks but often compromises their cross-task generalization ability. This degradation is often caused by excessive changes in the representations, making it…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Pre-training has been a useful method for learning implicit transferable knowledge and it shows the benefit of offering complementary features across different modalities. Recent work mainly focuses on the modalities such as image and text,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Understanding how language model capabilities transfer from pretraining to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to efficient model development and data curation. In this work, we investigate four core questions: RQ1. To what extent…

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…

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

In recent years, challenging control problems became solvable with deep reinforcement learning (RL). To be able to use RL for large-scale real-world applications, a certain degree of reliability in their performance is necessary. Reported…

Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising technique to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a critical step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human instructions and values, yet many aspects of SFT remain poorly understood. We trained a wide range of base models on a variety of datasets…

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…

Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to generate personalized image captions, even when trained on high-quality captions. In this work, we observe that such limitations persist in existing post-training-based MLLM…

Does Reinforcement Learning (RL) merely amplify existing skills, or synthesize novel skills? We investigate this question through the lens of Complementary Reasoning: the critical practical capability of integrating internal knowledge with…

We transform reinforcement learning (RL) into a form of supervised learning (SL) by turning traditional RL on its head, calling this Upside Down RL (UDRL). Standard RL predicts rewards, while UDRL instead uses rewards as task-defining…

Fine-tuning foundation models has emerged as a powerful approach for generating objects with specific desired properties. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective framework for this purpose, enabling models to generate outputs that…

Fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models has been challenging because of a lack of large scale off-the-shelf datasets as well as high variance in transferability among different environments. Recent work has looked at tackling offline…

Distilling the tool-using capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient small language models (SLMs) is a key challenge for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT),…