Related papers: Beyond Imitation: Recovering Dense Rewards from De…

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

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…

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…

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models. While on-policy reinforcement learning can reduce forgetting, it…

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Although supervised finetuning (SFT) has emerged as an essential technique to align large language models with humans, it is considered superficial, with style learning being its nature. At the same time, recent works indicate the…

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) are standard for LLM alignment, they either rely on costly expert data or discard valuable negative samples, leading to data inefficiency. To address this, we…

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…

Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning infers a reward function from expert demonstrations, aiming to encode the behavior and intentions of the expert. Current approaches usually do this with generative and uni-modal models, meaning that they…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…