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Reinforcement learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models, particularly in mathematics and coding. While recent efforts have extended this paradigm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Hanxu Hu , Yuxuan Wang , Maggie Huan , Jannis Vamvas , Yinya Huang , Zhijiang Guo , Rico Sennrich

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) advances for Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved reasoning tasks, yet their resource-constrained application to medical imaging remains underexplored. We introduce ChexReason, a vision-language…

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhiwen Ruan , Yun Chen , Yutao Hou , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories demonstrations is a common approach for enabling reasoning in large language models. Standard practices typically only retain trajectories with correct final answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xueyun Tian , Minghua Ma , Bingbing Xu , Nuoyan Lyu , Wei Li , Heng Dong , Zheng Chu , Yuanzhuo Wang , Huawei Shen

Evolution Strategies (ES) has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, offering advantages through simplicity, scalability, and inference-only training.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Kajetan Schweighofer , Conor F. Hayes , Roberto Dailey , Risto Miikkulainen , Xin Qiu

The alignments of reasoning abilities between smaller and larger Language Models are largely conducted via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using demonstrations generated from robust Large Language Models (LLMs). Although these approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Leonardo Ranaldi , Andrè Freitas

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 (RL) with verifiable rewards has become a standard post-training stage for boosting visual reasoning in vision-language models, yet it remains unclear what capabilities RL actually improves compared with supervised…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xirui Li , Ming Li , Tianyi Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a pivotal challenge in advancing AI capabilities. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are the dominant training paradigms, a systematic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Hiroshi Yoshihara , Taiki Yamaguchi , Yuichi Inoue

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories has become a pivotal phase in building large reasoning models. However, how CoT trajectories from different sources influence the generalization performance of models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhaoyi Li , Xiangyu Xi , Zhengyu Chen , Wei Wang , Gangwei Jiang , Ranran Shen , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Math reasoning has become the poster child of progress in large language models (LLMs), with new models rapidly surpassing human-level performance on benchmarks like MATH and AIME. But as math leaderboards improve week by week, it is worth…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Maggie Huan , Yuetai Li , Tuney Zheng , Xiaoyu Xu , Seungone Kim , Minxin Du , Radha Poovendran , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

Training LLMs to think and reason for longer has become a key ingredient in building state-of-the-art models that can solve complex problems previously out of reach. Recent efforts pursue this in different ways, such as RL fine-tuning to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yihao Xue , Allan Zhang , Jianhao Huang , Amit Sahai , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have substantially improved the training of large-scale language models, leading to significant gains in generation quality and reasoning ability. However, most existing research focuses on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Di Zhang , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Lingjie Jiang , Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Zewen Chi , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

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

Post-training has become essential for adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex downstream behaviors, including instruction following, preference alignment, and multi-step reasoning. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Chengqian Zhang , Wei Zhu , Kyumin Lee