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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

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Bo Wang , Qinyuan Cheng , Runyu Peng , Rong Bao , Peiji Li , Qipeng Guo , Linyang Li , Zhiyuan Zeng , Yunhua Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Supervised and preference-based fine-tuning techniques have become popular for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user intent and correctness criteria. However, real-world training data often exhibits spurious correlations --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Julia Shuieh , Prasann Singhal , Apaar Shanker , John Heyer , George Pu , Samuel Denton

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Kiran Ramnath , Xiang-Bo Mao , Regunathan Radhakrishnan , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Packing, initially utilized in the pre-training phase, is an optimization technique designed to maximize hardware resource efficiency by combining different training sequences to fit the model's maximum input length. Although it has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Shuhe Wang , Guoyin Wang , Yizhong Wang , Jiwei Li , Eduard Hovy , Chen Guo

Although supervised finetuning (SFT) has emerged as an essential technique to align large language models with humans, it is considered superficial, with style learning being its nature. At the same time, recent works indicate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Ming Shen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as a crucial method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human-annotated demonstrations. However, SFT, being an off-policy approach similar to behavior cloning, often struggles with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Zhenghao Xu , Tianyi Liu , Shiyang Li , Rongzhi Zhang , Zheng Li , Lihong Li , Bing Yin , Chao Zhang , Jianshu Chen , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely used after supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align language models, yet empirical behavior under small backbones and modest data is under-specified. We systematically compare SFT-only, DPO-only,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yuming Feng , Christy Yang

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have achieved great success in various Software Engineering (SE) downstream tasks following the ``pre-train then fine-tune'' paradigm. As fully fine-tuning all parameters of PTMs can be computationally expensive, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Wentao Zou , Qi Li , Jidong Ge , Chuanyi Li , Xiaoyu Shen , Liguo Huang , Bin Luo

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Pietro Bernardelle , Gianluca Demartini

Recent work has demonstrated that pre-training in-domain language models can boost performance when adapting to a new domain. However, the costs associated with pre-training raise an important question: given a fixed budget, what steps…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Fan Bai , Alan Ritter , Wei Xu

As LLMs continue to scale, improving training efficiency increasingly depends on using data more effectively. Data selection addresses this problem by allocating a limited training budget to samples that best promote a target behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Qihao Lin , Guanxu Chen , Dongrui Liu , Jing Shao

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

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

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin
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