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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

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Song Lai , Haohan Zhao , Rong Feng , Changyi Ma , Wenzhuo Liu , Hongbo Zhao , Xi Lin , Dong Yi , Qingfu Zhang , Hongbin Liu , Gaofeng Meng , Fei Zhu

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

Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Maxime Heuillet , Yufei Cui , Boxing Chen , Audrey Durand , Prasanna Parthasarathi

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a pivotal challenge in advancing AI capabilities. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are the dominant training paradigms, a systematic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Hiroshi Yoshihara , Taiki Yamaguchi , Yuichi Inoue

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

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is proved to be greatly valuable for enhancing the reasoning ability of LLMs. Researchers have been starting to apply RFT to MLLMs, hoping it will also enhance the capabilities of visual understanding.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaxu Chen , Wei Li , Chunxu Liu , Chi Xie , Xiaoyan Hu , Chengqian Ma , Feng Zhu , Rui Zhao

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yishu Wei , Yi Lin , Adam Flanders , George Shih , Yifan Peng

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yangzhen Wu , Shanda Li , Zixin Wen , Xin Zhou , Ameet Talwalkar , Yiming Yang , Wenhao Huang , Tianle Cai

Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wenqiao Zhu , Ji Liu , Rongjuncheng Zhang , Haipang Wu , Yulun Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

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

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is increasingly impractical, making post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning (RL-FT, e.g., PPO) central to modern practice. Using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hangzhan Jin , Sicheng Lv , Sifan Wu , Mohammad Hamdaqa