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Morphology-aware policy learning is a means of enhancing policy sample efficiency by aggregating data from multiple agents. These types of policies have previously been shown to help generalize over dynamic, kinematic, and limb…

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Qihan Ren , Peng Wang , Ruikun Cai , Shuai Shao , Dadi Guo , Yuejin Xie , Yafu Li , Quanshi Zhang , Xia Hu , Jing Shao , Dongrui Liu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

Despite the promise of RLHF in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it often leads to superficial alignment, prioritizing stylistic changes over improving downstream performance of LLMs. Underspecified preferences could obscure directions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Kyungjae Lee , Dasol Hwang , Sunghyun Park , Youngsoo Jang , Moontae Lee

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) improves in-domain performance but can degrade out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Prior work suggests that this degradation is related to changes in dominant singular subspaces of pretrained weight matrices.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hangzhan Jin , Tianwei Ni , Lu Li , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Mohammad Hamdaqa , Doina Precup

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) are the two dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance on downstream tasks. While RL generally preserves broader model capabilities (retention) better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan , Zijie Liu , Zhen Tan , Charles Fleming , Tianlong Chen

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Zhao Mandi , Pieter Abbeel , Stephen James

To acquire instruction-following capabilities, large language models (LLMs) undergo instruction tuning, where they are trained on instruction-response pairs using next-token prediction (NTP). Efforts to improve instruction tuning often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuxin Xiao , Shujian Zhang , Wenxuan Zhou , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Sanqiang Zhao

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

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

High-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data are crucial for eliciting strong capabilities from pretrained large language models (LLMs). Typically, instructions are paired with multiple responses sampled from other LLMs, which are often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Dylan Zhang , Qirun Dai , Hao Peng

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

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Yifan Wang , Yiyang Huang , Yun Fu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across natural language processing (NLP) tasks. As real-world applications increasingly demand longer context windows, continued pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Yingming Zheng , Hanqi Li , Kai Yu , Lu Chen

Direct evaluation of LLMs on benchmarks can be misleading because comparatively strong performance may reflect task familiarity rather than capability. The train-before-test approach controls for task familiarity by giving each model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kun Wang , Reinhard Heckel

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has been demonstrated to significantly enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) by aligning their outputs with desired human values through instruction tuning. However, RLHF…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Zhang Ze Yu , Lau Jia Jaw , Zhang Hui , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) allows model builders to capture the task-specific parameters into adapters, which are a fraction of the size of the original base model. Popularity of PEFT technique for fine-tuning has led to the…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Saransh Gupta , Umesh Deshpande , Travis Janssen , Swami Sundararaman

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Gabriel Mukobi , Peter Chatain , Su Fong , Robert Windesheim , Gitta Kutyniok , Kush Bhatia , Silas Alberti

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Davood Rafiei , Morgan Lindsay Heisler , Weiwei Zhang , Mohammadreza Pourreza , Yong Zhang

Understanding how language model capabilities transfer from pretraining to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to efficient model development and data curation. In this work, we investigate four core questions: RQ1. To what extent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Simin Fan , Dimitris Paparas , Natasha Noy , Binbin Xiong , Noveen Sachdeva , Berivan Isik