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Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Mayank Mishra , Gaurav Pandey , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for binary classification tasks such as toxicity detection, factuality verification, and causal inference. However, SFT often performs poorly in real-world settings with label noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Punya Syon Pandey , Zhijing Jin

Aligning Diffusion models has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in generating high-quality, human preference-aligned images. Existing techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and DPO-style preference optimization, have become…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zening Sun , Zhengpeng Xie , Lichen Bai , Shitong Shao , Shuo Yang , Zeke Xie

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

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

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

As supervised fine-tuning (SFT) evolves from a lightweight post-training step into a compute-intensive phase rivaling mid-training in scale, data efficiency has become critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) under tight budgets.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Shaobo Wang , Jiaming Wang , Jiajun Zhang , Cong Wang , Yue Min , Zichen Wen , Xingzhang Ren , Fei Huang , Huiqiang Jiang , Junyang Lin , Dayiheng Liu , Linfeng Zhang

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

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Siyuan Lu , Zechuan Wang , Hongxuan Zhang , Qintong Wu , Leilei Gan , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu , Tao Lin

Large language models (LLMs) encode extensive world knowledge through pre-training on massive datasets, which can then be fine-tuned for the question-answering (QA) task. However, effective strategies for fine-tuning LLMs for the QA task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, we identify a critical trade-off: while unconstrained RFT achieves strong reasoning performance, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shuozhe Li , Jincheng Cao , Bodun Hu , Aryan Mokhtari , Leqi Liu , Amy Zhang

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Duygu Nur Yaldiz , Evangelia Spiliopoulou , Zheng Qi , Siddharth Varia , Srikanth Doss , Nikolaos Pappas

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

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

Packing, initially utilized in the pre-training phase, is an optimization technique designed to maximize hardware resource efficiency by combining different training sequences to fit the model's maximum input length. Although it has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Shuhe Wang , Guoyin Wang , Yizhong Wang , Jiwei Li , Eduard Hovy , Chen Guo

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

Harnessing the power of human-annotated data through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is pivotal for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we delve into the prospect of growing a strong LLM out of a weak one without the need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zixiang Chen , Yihe Deng , Huizhuo Yuan , Kaixuan Ji , Quanquan Gu

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

While state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex visual-text tasks, their success heavily relies on massive model scaling, limiting their practical deployment. Small-scale VLMs offer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Huilin Deng , Ding Zou , Rui Ma , Hongchen Luo , Yang Cao , Yu Kang