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Related papers: Debunk the Myth of SFT Generalization

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While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has enhanced the reasoning of large-scale language models (LLMs), its efficacy for lightweight multimodal language models (MLLMs) with fewer than seven billion parameters remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Linyu Ou , YuYang Yin

Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to specialize in downstream tasks, with the Cross Entropy (CE) loss being the de facto choice. However, CE maximizes the likelihood of observed data without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tian Xu , Zeyu Qin , Jiancong Xiao , Zhi-Quan Luo , Ruoyu Sun

Pretrained on large-scale and diverse datasets, VLA models demonstrate strong generalization and adaptability as general-purpose robotic policies. However, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which serves as the primary mechanism for adapting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yuan Liu , Haoran Li , Shuai Tian , Yuxing Qin , Yuhui Chen , Yupeng Zheng , Yongzhen Huang , Dongbin Zhao

Chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models can trigger an "overthinking trap": longer rollouts raise cost and latency yet often yield unreliable accuracy gains. Existing methods use global, static controls that may suppress needed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Hanyu Li , Jiangshan Duo , Bofei Gao , Hailin Zhang , Sujian Li , Xiaotie Deng , Liang Zhao

Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wenqiao Zhu , Ji Liu , Rongjuncheng Zhang , Haipang Wu , Yulun Zhang

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Prompt learning has emerged as a promising method for adapting pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) to a range of downstream tasks. While optimizing the context can be effective for improving performance on specific tasks, it can often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Fangming Cui , Jan Fong , Rongfei Zeng , Xinmei Tian , Jun Yu

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

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

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Pingzhi Tang , Yiding Wang , Muhan Zhang

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

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

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) dominate the post-training landscape for mathematical reasoning, yet differ fundamentally in their reliance on expert trajectories. To understand the optimal way to harness these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bowen Ding , Yuhan Chen , Jiayang Lyv , Jiyao Yuan , Qi Zhu , Shuangshuang Tian , Dantong Zhu , Futing Wang , Heyuan Deng , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Tao Lin

Query-focused Summarization (QfS) deals with systems that generate summaries from document(s) based on a query. Motivated by the insight that Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a generalization to Supervised Learning (SL) for Natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Swaroop Nath , Harshad Khadilkar , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jacob L. Block , Sundararajan Srinivasan , Liam Collins , Aryan Mokhtari , Sanjay Shakkottai

Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explanations.This behavior leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations rely on spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Reza Bayat , Mohammad Pezeshki , Elvis Dohmatob , David Lopez-Paz , Pascal Vincent

In recent years, continual learning with pre-training (CLPT) has received widespread interest, instead of its traditional focus of training from scratch. The use of strong pre-trained models (PTMs) can greatly facilitate knowledge transfer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Gengwei Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Guoliang Kang , Ling Chen , Yunchao Wei

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jackson Harmon , Andreas Hochlehnert , Matthias Bethge , Ameya Prabhu