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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a predominant alignment method for diffusion models, facilitating off-policy training without explicit reward modeling. However, its reliance on large-scale, high-quality human preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Khiem Pham , Quang Nguyen , Tung Nguyen , Jingsen Zhu , Michele Santacatterina , Dimitris Metaxas , Ramin Zabih

Large language models (LLMs) often contain misleading content, emphasizing the need to align them with human values to ensure secure AI systems. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been employed to achieve this alignment.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Feifan Song , Bowen Yu , Minghao Li , Haiyang Yu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Houfeng Wang

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

Dataset diversity plays a pivotal role for the successful training of many machine learning models, particularly in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage of large language model (LLM) development. Despite increasing recognition of its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Haoyu Li , Xuhong Li , Yiming Dong , Kun Liu

Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning

While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) are standard for LLM alignment, they either rely on costly expert data or discard valuable negative samples, leading to data inefficiency. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zehua Liu , Shuqi Liu , Tao Zhong , Mingxuan Yuan

We aim to improve the reasoning capabilities of diffusion language models (DLMs). While SFT is a popular post-training recipe for autoregressive models, its use in DLMs faces challenges and can even hurt performance, though the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Shubham Parashar , Atharv Chagi , Jacob Helwig , Lakshmi Jotsna , Sushil Vemuri , James Caverlee , Dileep Kalathil , Shuiwang Ji

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Lai Wei , Yuting Li , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Linghe Kong , Weiran Huang , Lichao Sun

The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through post-training reveals a pronounced generalization gap: models fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning (RL) consistently achieve superior out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Aojun Lu , Tao Feng , Hangjie Yuan , Wei Li , Yanan Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities, often amplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning (RL). Although RL algorithms can substantially improve reasoning, they struggle to expand reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xiangchi Yuan , Xiang Chen , Tong Yu , Dachuan Shi , Can Jin , Wenke Lee , Saayan Mitra

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chengpeng Li , Guanting Dong , Keming Lu , Chuanqi Tan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

In aligning large language models (LLMs), reward models have played an important role, but are standardly trained as discriminative models and rely only on labeled human preference data. In this paper, we explore methods that train reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Yifu Huo , Yongyu Mu , Qiaozhi He , Murun Yang , Bei Li , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu

Feature Transformation (FT) crafts new features from original ones via mathematical operations to enhance dataset expressiveness for downstream models. However, existing FT methods exhibit critical limitations: discrete search struggles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Nanxu Gong , Zijun Li , Sixun Dong , Haoyue Bai , Wangyang Ying , Xinyuan Wang , Yanjie Fu

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Ifdita Hasan Orney , Ellen Xu , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have achieved significant success by adopting the paradigm of large-scale pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, existing approaches struggle with temporal reasoning due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Shicheng Li , Lei Li , Kun Ouyang , Shuhuai Ren , Yuanxin Liu , Yuanxing Zhang , Fuzheng Zhang , Lingpeng Kong , Qi Liu , Xu Sun

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gaotang Li , Ruizhong Qiu , Xiusi Chen , Heng Ji , Hanghang Tong

Conventionally, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is treated as a simple imitation learning process that only trains a policy to imitate expert behavior on demonstration datasets. In this work, we challenge this view by establishing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Jiangnan Li , Thuy-Trang Vu , Ehsan Abbasnejad , Gholamreza Haffari

In this article, we investigate the alignment of Large Language Models according to human preferences. We discuss the features of training a Preference Model, which simulates human preferences, and the methods and details we found essential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Alexey Kutalev , Sergei Markoff

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet their potential for sequential decision-making remains underexplored. In this paper, we study the ICL capabilities of LLMs in sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Minmin Zhang , Sina Aghaei , Soroush Saghafian