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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) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mrinal Rawat , Arkajyoti Chakraborty , Neha Gupta , Roberto Pieraccini

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jinghan Jia , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hongyi James Cai , Junlin Wang , Xiaoyin Chen , Bhuwan Dhingra

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

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

Large vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly adopt post-training techniques such as long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to elicit sophisticated reasoning. While these methods exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Jierun Chen , Tiezheng Yu , Haoli Bai , Lewei Yao , Jiannan Wu , Kaican Li , Fei Mi , Chaofan Tao , Lei Zhu , Manyi Zhang , Xiaohui Li , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Li Shen , Jing Bai , Kam-Fai Wong

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yuqian Fu , Tinghong Chen , Jiajun Chai , Xihuai Wang , Songjun Tu , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

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

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) 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 (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

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet it remains unclear whether RL improves medical visual reasoning or mainly sharpens behaviors already induced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ahmadreza Jeddi , Kimia Shaban , Negin Baghbanzadeh , Natasha Sharan , Abhishek Moturu , Elham Dolatabadi , Babak Taati

Training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning via maths and code datasets has become a major new focus in LLM post-training. Two particularly popular approaches are reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Neel Rajani , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Ivan Titov

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang