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Related papers: Proximal Supervised Fine-Tuning

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Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Xiaoyang Tan , Yaozhong Gan

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

Conventionally, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is treated as a simple imitation learning process that only trains a policy to imitate expert behavior on demonstration datasets. In this work, we challenge this view by establishing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Jiangnan Li , Thuy-Trang Vu , Ehsan Abbasnejad , Gholamreza Haffari

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a method for enhancing model performance by directly optimizing for the preferences or rankings of outcomes, instead of traditional loss functions. This approach has proven effective in aligning Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Ruoyu Wang , Jiachen Sun , Shaowei Hua , Quan Fang

Adapting Foundation Models (FMs) for downstream tasks through Federated Learning (FL) emerges a promising strategy for protecting data privacy and valuable FMs. Existing methods fine-tune FM by allocating sub-FM to clients in FL, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Zhaopeng Peng , Xiaoliang Fan , Yufan Chen , Zheng Wang , Shirui Pan , Chenglu Wen , Ruisheng Zhang , Cheng Wang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dawid J. Kopiczko , Sagar Vaze , Tijmen Blankevoort , Yuki M. Asano

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

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

Foundation models encode rich representations that can be adapted to downstream tasks by fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning a model on one data distribution often degrades performance under distribution shifts. Current approaches to robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Caroline Choi , Yoonho Lee , Annie Chen , Allan Zhou , Aditi Raghunathan , Chelsea Finn

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Heshan Fernando , Han Shen , Parikshit Ram , Yi Zhou , Horst Samulowitz , Nathalie Baracaldo , Tianyi Chen

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Ifdita Hasan Orney , Ellen Xu , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Junyu Luo , Xiao Luo , Kaize Ding , Jingyang Yuan , Zhiping Xiao , Ming Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Qi Liu , Mingdi Sun , Yongyi He , Zhi Zheng , Tong Xu , Yi Zheng , Zhefeng Wang , Enhong Chen

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent