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Related papers: RL Squeezes, SFT Expands: A Comparative Study of R…

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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

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

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

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

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

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving. However, existing research predominantly relies on reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 ShaoZhen Liu , Xinting Huang , Houwen Peng , Xin Chen , Xinyang Song , Qi Li , Zhenan Sun

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

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) 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

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

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities, often amplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning (RL). Although RL algorithms can substantially improve reasoning, they struggle to expand reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xiangchi Yuan , Xiang Chen , Tong Yu , Dachuan Shi , Can Jin , Wenke Lee , Saayan Mitra

Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Tong Zheng , Hongming Zhang , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoyang Wang , Runpeng Dai , Rui Liu , Huiwen Bao , Chengsong Huang , Heng Huang , Dong Yu

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Nuo Chen , Zhiyuan Hu , Qingyun Zou , Jiaying Wu , Qian Wang , Bryan Hooi , Bingsheng He

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

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

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
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