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This paper presents a study on strategies to enhance the translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of machine translation (MT) tasks. The paper proposes a novel paradigm consisting of three stages: Secondary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Jiaxin Guo , Hao Yang , Zongyao Li , Daimeng Wei , Hengchao Shang , Xiaoyu Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

In recent years, developing compact and efficient large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a thriving area of research. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which relies on singular ground truth labels, often fails to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jingyao Li , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Han Shi , Chuanyang Zheng , Hong Xu , Jiaya Jia

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 critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

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

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Mohit Raghavendra , Vaskar Nath , Sean Hendryx

Unsupervised cross-lingual pretraining has achieved strong results in neural machine translation (NMT), by drastically reducing the need for large parallel data. Most approaches adapt masked-language modeling (MLM) to sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Christos Baziotis , Ivan Titov , Alexandra Birch , Barry Haddow

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Wei Lu , Rachel K. Luu , Markus J. Buehler

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of unlabelled data have greatly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we re-visit the widely accepted notion in NLP that continued pre-training LMs on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Zhengxiang Shi , Aldo Lipani

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across natural language processing (NLP) tasks. As real-world applications increasingly demand longer context windows, continued pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Yingming Zheng , Hanqi Li , Kai Yu , Lu Chen

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Huan Wang , Yizhou Wang , Qihua Dong , Yitian Zhang , Yun Fu

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

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

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the standard post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, the conventional SFT process, driven by Cross-Entropy (CE) loss, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yijie Chen , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng

State-of-the-art natural language understanding classification models follow two-stages: pre-training a large language model on an auxiliary task, and then fine-tuning the model on a task-specific labeled dataset using cross-entropy loss.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Beliz Gunel , Jingfei Du , Alexis Conneau , Ves Stoyanov

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Kiran Ramnath , Xiang-Bo Mao , Regunathan Radhakrishnan , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

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