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Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as a crucial method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human-annotated demonstrations. However, SFT, being an off-policy approach similar to behavior cloning, often struggles with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Zhenghao Xu , Tianyi Liu , Shiyang Li , Rongzhi Zhang , Zheng Li , Lihong Li , Bing Yin , Chao Zhang , Jianshu Chen , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiwen Ruan , Yixia Li , He Zhu , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated that Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning data distilled from large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) can effectively transfer reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bin Yu , Hang Yuan , Haotian Li , Xueyin Xu , Yuliang Wei , Bailing Wang , Weizhen Qi , Kai Chen

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shengyu Zhang , Linfeng Dong , Xiaoya Li , Sen Zhang , Xiaofei Sun , Shuhe Wang , Jiwei Li , Runyi Hu , Tianwei Zhang , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

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

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

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits broad capabilities, yet, for specific tasks or domains their attainment of higher accuracy and more reliable reasoning generally depends on post-training through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haitao Jiang , Wenbo Zhang , Jiarui Yao , Hengrui Cai , Sheng Wang , Rui Song

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameters emerge diverse abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Guanting Dong , Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Chengpeng Li , Mingfeng Xue , Dayiheng Liu , Wei Wang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in generating human-like text, proving to be a valuable asset across various applications. However, adapting these models to incorporate new, out-of-domain…

Handling distribution shifts from training data, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, poses a significant challenge in the field of machine learning. While a pre-trained vision-language model like CLIP has demonstrated…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Bac Nguyen , Stefan Uhlich , Fabien Cardinaux , Lukas Mauch , Marzieh Edraki , Aaron Courville

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Muxi Diao , Lele Yang , Wuxuan Gong , Yutong Zhang , Zhonghao Yan , Yufei Han , Kongming Liang , Weiran Xu , Zhanyu Ma

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a standard approach for injecting domain knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs). However, relying on validation perplexity to monitor training is often insufficient, as it confounds stylistic mimicry…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Soheil Zibakhsh Shabgahi , Pedram Aghazadeh , Farinaz Koushanfar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, but developing high-performing models for specialized applications often requires substantial human annotation -- a process that is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Abhinav Arabelly , Jagrut Nemade , Robert D Nowak , Jifan Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Tao Liu , Taiqiang Wu , Runming Yang , Shaoning Sun , Junjie Wang , Yujiu Yang