English
Related papers

Related papers: RL Fine-Tuning Heals OOD Forgetting in SFT

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

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

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruiying Peng , Mengyu Yang , Jing Lei , Xiaohui Li , Xueyu Wu , Xinlei Chen

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

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

A prevailing view holds that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) memorizes training data and fails to generalize, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) attains broader robustness. We revisit this claim through a systematic evaluation on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiaofeng Lin , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Xuezhou Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Song Lai , Haohan Zhao , Rong Feng , Changyi Ma , Wenzhuo Liu , Hongbo Zhao , Xi Lin , Dong Yi , Qingfu Zhang , Hongbin Liu , Gaofeng Meng , Fei Zhu

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Bingwen Wei , Xinlei Chen , Qingmin Liao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yangzhen Wu , Shanda Li , Zixin Wen , Xin Zhou , Ameet Talwalkar , Yiming Yang , Wenhao Huang , Tianle Cai

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, with post-training playing a crucial role in enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Among post-training paradigms, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used: it leverages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Lisong Sun , Li Wang , Chen Zhang , Jinyang Wu , Kui Zhang , Tianhao Peng , Wenjun Wu

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Pratham Singla , Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Ishan Garg , Ketan Suhaas Saichandran

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well in single-image visual grounding but struggle with real-world tasks that demand cross-image reasoning and multi-modal instructions. To address this, we adopt a reinforcement learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Bob Zhang , Haoran Li , Tao Zhang , Jianan Li , Cilin Yan , Xikai Liu , Jiayin Cai , Yanbin Hao

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) component has become significant for complex reasoning tasks. However, in conventional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), the model could allocate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Xiaofeng Shi , Qian Kou , Yuduo Li , Hua Zhou

Post-training methods, especially Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), play an important role in improving large language models' (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities. However, the dominant two-stage pipeline (SFT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Mingyu Su , Jian Guan , Yuxian Gu , Minlie Huang , Hongning Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li