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Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become the de facto post-training strategy for large vision-language-action (VLA) models, but its reliance on costly human demonstrations limits scalability and generalization. We propose Probe, Learn,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Wenli Xiao , Haotian Lin , Andy Peng , Haoru Xue , Tairan He , Yuqi Xie , Fengyuan Hu , Jimmy Wu , Zhengyi Luo , Linxi "Jim" Fan , Guanya Shi , Yuke Zhu

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

This paper explores a scientific question in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): why SFT is broadly effective for small-scale deep neural networks, yet can produce inconsistent or even detrimental effects when applied to large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Junpeng Zhang , Lei Cheng , Guoxi Zhang , Hua Cai , Qing Xu , Quanshi Zhang

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi Hu , Shijia Kang , Haotong Yang , Haotian Xu , Muhan Zhang

Recent supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have significantly improved language models' performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, even when models are trained at a small scale. However, the specific capabilities enhanced through such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yiyou Sun , Georgia Zhou , Haoyue Bai , Hao Wang , Dacheng Li , Nouha Dziri , Dawn Song

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Current methods for training self-correction typically depend on either multiple…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) to new domains. In this work, we improve the statistical efficiency of SFT by selecting an informative subset of training examples. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rohan Deb , Kiran Thekumparampil , Kousha Kalantari , Gaurush Hiranandani , Shoham Sabach , Branislav Kveton

Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Peiyi Wang , Lei Li , Liang Chen , Feifan Song , Binghuai Lin , Yunbo Cao , Tianyu Liu , Zhifang Sui

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

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Yifan Wang , Yiyang Huang , Yun Fu

Vision-language alignment in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). To align multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage, supervised…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Xin Jin , Siyuan Li , Siyong Jian , Kai Yu , Huan Wang

The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuanfu Wang , Zhixuan Liu , Xiangtian Li , Chaochao Lu , Chao Yang

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the nature and diversity of the data used before and during RL. In particular, reasoning problems can often be approached in multiple ways that rely…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aswin RRV , Jacob Dineen , Divij Handa , Mihir Parmar , Ben Zhou , Swaroop Mishra , Chitta Baral

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-16 David McAllister , Miika Aittala , Tero Karras , Janne Hellsten , Angjoo Kanazawa , Timo Aila , Samuli Laine

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yiming Ju , Ziyi Ni , Xingrun Xing , Zhixiong Zeng , hanyu Zhao , Siqi Fan , Zheng Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using zeroth-order optimization (ZO) offers a memory-efficient alternative to gradient-based methods but suffers from slower convergence and unstable optimization due to noisy gradient estimates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jikai Long , Zijian Hu , Xiaodong Yu , Jianwen Xie , Zhaozhuo Xu

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrow, task-specific data, often degrading their general knowledge and reasoning abilities. We propose SA-SFT, a lightweight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Yutao Sun , Mingshuai Chen , Tiancheng Zhao , Phillip Miao , Zilun Zhang , Haozhan Shen , Ruizhe Zhu , Jianwei Yin