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Post-training of reasoning LLMs is a holistic process that typically consists of an offline SFT stage followed by an online reinforcement learning (RL) stage. However, SFT is often optimized in isolation to maximize SFT performance alone.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Dylan Zhang , Yufeng Xu , Haojin Wang , Qingzhi Chen , Hao Peng

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

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

Post-training, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) using self-play-generated data, has become a new learning paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, scaling RL to develop a general reasoner remains a research challenge, as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Tianlong Wang , Junzhe Chen , Xueting Han , Jing Bai

Recent advancements in Chain of Thought (COT) generation have significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as an effective post-training approach. Multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yi Chen , Yuying Ge , Rui Wang , Yixiao Ge , Lu Qiu , Ying Shan , Xihui Liu

Automating penetration testing is crucial for enhancing cybersecurity, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations in this domain, including poor error handling, inefficient reasoning, and an inability to perform…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 He Kong , Die Hu , Jingguo Ge , Liangxiong Li , Hui Li , Tong Li

Open-source, multilingual medical large language models (LLMs) have the potential to serve linguistically diverse populations across different regions. Adapting generic LLMs for healthcare often requires continual pretraining, but this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Meng Zhou , Surajsinh Parmar , Anubhav Bhatti

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a well-established problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which aims to facilitate rapid RL by leveraging expert demonstrations to pre-train the RL agent. However, the limited availability of expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Spatial reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention due to applications in navigation and planning. Despite strong general language capabilities, LLMs still struggle with spatial transformations and multi-step…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Amir Tahmasbi , Sadegh Majidi , Kazem Taram , Aniket Bera

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

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

Building a search relevance model that achieves both low latency and high performance is a long-standing challenge in the search industry. To satisfy the millisecond-level response requirements of online systems while retaining the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Shijie Zhang , Xiang Guo , Rujun Guo , Shaoyu Liu , Xiaozhao Wang , Guanjun Jiang , Kevin Zhang

Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yaowen Ye , Cassidy Laidlaw , Jacob Steinhardt

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective method of finding reasoning pathways in incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). To overcome the challenges of a large action space, a self-supervised pre-training method is proposed to warm up the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Ying Ma , Owen Burns , Mingqiu Wang , Gang Li , Nan Du , Laurent El Shafey , Liqiang Wang , Izhak Shafran , Hagen Soltau

This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown great promise in achieving humanlevel reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), and has recently been extended to MLLMs. Nevertheless, reasoning about videos, which is a fundamental…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Qi Wang , Yanrui Yu , Ye Yuan , Rui Mao , Tianfei Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yan Ma , Steffi Chern , Xuyang Shen , Yiran Zhong , Pengfei Liu