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While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become essential for eliciting complex reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the substantial memory overhead of storing Key-Value (KV) caches during long-horizon rollouts acts as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sijia Luo , Xiaokang Zhang , Yuxuan Hu , Bohan Zhang , Ke Wang , Jinbo Su , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Jing Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Renfei Zhang , Manasa Kaniselvan , Niloofar Mireshghallah

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Bingwen Wei , Xinlei Chen , Qingmin Liao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Parameter-efficient methods like LoRA have revolutionised large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. ReLoRA extends this idea to pretraining by repeatedly merging and reinitialising low-rank adapters, increasing cumulative rank while keeping…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yuval Weiss , David Demitri Africa , Paula Buttery , Richard Diehl Martinez

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jie Chen , Xintian Han , Yu Ma , Xun Zhou , Liang Xiang

Comparison of fine-tuning models with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) reveals that, despite similar performance at a new task, RL preserves prior knowledge and capabilities significantly better. We find that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Idan Shenfeld , Jyothish Pari , Pulkit Agrawal

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifu Han , Geo Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jiayu Wang , Yifei Ming , Zixuan Ke , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Aws Albarghouthi , Frederic Sala

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the unique capability to understand and generate human-like text from input queries. When fine-tuned, these models show enhanced performance on domain-specific queries. OpenAI highlights the process of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Scott Barnett , Zac Brannelly , Stefanus Kurniawan , Sheng Wong

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can be accurately fine-tuned for downstream text processing tasks. Recently, researchers have introduced several parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods that optimize input prompts or adjust a small number…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Saeed Najafi , Alona Fyshe

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…

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…

Despite the remarkable success of pre-trained language models (PLMs), they still face two challenges: First, large-scale PLMs are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Second, on the downstream tasks, PLMs tend to rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Yuanxin Liu , Fandong Meng , Zheng Lin , Jiangnan Li , Peng Fu , Yanan Cao , Weiping Wang , Jie Zhou

Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, only modify a small subset of parameters, they can have a significant impact on the model. Our instruction-tuning experiments show that LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Matthew Riemer , Erik Miehling , Miao Liu , Djallel Bouneffouf , Murray Campbell

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent across diverse applications. However, their enormous size limits storage and processing capabilities to a few well-resourced stakeholders. As a result, most applications rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Mohammadsajad Alipour , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri