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Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

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…

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

This paper investigates the role of explicit thinking process in rule-based reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) for MLLMs. We first propose CLS-RL for MLLM image classification, using verifiable rewards for fine-tuning. Experiments show CLS-RL…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Ming Li , Jike Zhong , Shitian Zhao , Yuxiang Lai , Haoquan Zhang , Wang Bill Zhu , Kaipeng Zhang

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min 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

Enabling large language models with external tools has become a pivotal strategy for extending their functionality beyond text space. To enhance LLMs' tool-calling abilities, previous approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shaokun Zhang , Yi Dong , Jieyu Zhang , Jan Kautz , Bryan Catanzaro , Andrew Tao , Qingyun Wu , Zhiding Yu , Guilin Liu

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Kaiwen Zheng , Huayu Chen , Haotian Ye , Haoxiang Wang , Qinsheng Zhang , Kai Jiang , Hang Su , Stefano Ermon , Jun Zhu , Ming-Yu Liu

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) technologies, their application in the domain of autonomous driving has become increasingly widespread. However, existing methods suffer from unstructured reasoning, poor…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Chang Zhao , Zheming Yang , Yunqing Hu , Qi Guo , Zijian Wang , Pengcheng Li , Wen Ji

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve reasoning. Approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Yanzhi Zhang , Zhaoxi Zhang , Haoxiang Guan , Yilin Cheng , Yitong Duan , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Shuxin Zheng , Jiyan He

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevailing approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Among recent methods, GRPO stands out for its empirical success in training models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Wei Xiong , Jiarui Yao , Yuhui Xu , Bo Pang , Lei Wang , Doyen Sahoo , Junnan Li , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Hanze Dong

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Qianxi Li , Yingyue Cao , Jikun Kang , Tianpei Yang , Xi Chen , Jun Jin , Matthew E. Taylor