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Related papers: Supervised Fine-Tuning or Contrastive Learning? To…

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Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Effective document reranking is essential for improving search relevance across diverse applications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reranking due to their deep semantic understanding and reasoning, their high computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Dimitar Peshevski , Kiril Blazhevski , Martin Popovski , Gjorgji Madjarov

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

Vision-language alignment in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). To align multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage, supervised…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Xin Jin , Siyuan Li , Siyong Jian , Kai Yu , Huan Wang

Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) has attracted increasing attention for model pre-training via unlabeled data. The resulted CSL models provide instance-discriminative visual features that are uniformly scattered in the feature…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Yifan Zhang , Bryan Hooi , Dapeng Hu , Jian Liang , Jiashi Feng

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

Recent studies have shown that supervised fine-tuning of LLMs on a small number of high-quality datasets can yield strong reasoning capabilities. However, full fine-tuning (Full FT), while powerful, is computationally expensive and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zihang Liu , Tianyu Pang , Oleg Balabanov , Chaoqun Yang , Tianjin Huang , Lu Yin , Yaoqing Yang , Shiwei Liu

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

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

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

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is increasingly impractical, making post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning (RL-FT, e.g., PPO) central to modern practice. Using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hangzhan Jin , Sicheng Lv , Sifan Wu , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Prior research shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic extrapolation bias when forming predictions from both experimental and real-world data, and that prompt-based approaches appear limited in alleviating this bias. We…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-05 Zhenyu Gao , Wenxi Jiang , Yutong Yan

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gaotang Li , Ruizhong Qiu , Xiusi Chen , Heng Ji , Hanghang Tong

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Optimizing data mixtures for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing general-purpose models, yet this area remains underexplored. In this paper, we frame data mixing as an optimization problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuan Li , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric Xing

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the lack of labeled data by exploiting large unlabeled data through pseudolabeling. However, in the extremely low-label regime, pseudo labels could be incorrect, a.k.a. the confirmation bias, and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Xun Xu , Jingyi Liao , Lile Cai , Manh Cuong Nguyen , Kangkang Lu , Wanyue Zhang , Yasin Yazici , Chuan Sheng Foo

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

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…

Text ranking is a critical task in information retrieval. Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs), especially large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities for applying them to text ranking. While supervised…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Longhui Zhang , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Min Zhang