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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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

Comparison of fine-tuning models with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) reveals that, despite similar performance at a new task, RL preserves prior knowledge and capabilities significantly better. We find that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Idan Shenfeld , Jyothish Pari , Pulkit Agrawal

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet it remains unclear whether RL improves medical visual reasoning or mainly sharpens behaviors already induced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ahmadreza Jeddi , Kimia Shaban , Negin Baghbanzadeh , Natasha Sharan , Abhishek Moturu , Elham Dolatabadi , Babak Taati

Training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning via maths and code datasets has become a major new focus in LLM post-training. Two particularly popular approaches are reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Neel Rajani , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tianzhe Chu , Yuexiang Zhai , Jihan Yang , Shengbang Tong , Saining Xie , Dale Schuurmans , Quoc V. Le , Sergey Levine , Yi Ma

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…

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…