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Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities. Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) retains prior capabilities more effectively than supervised fine-tuning (SFT),…

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

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is proved to be greatly valuable for enhancing the reasoning ability of LLMs. Researchers have been starting to apply RFT to MLLMs, hoping it will also enhance the capabilities of visual understanding.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaxu Chen , Wei Li , Chunxu Liu , Chi Xie , Xiaoyan Hu , Chengqian Ma , Feng Zhu , Rui Zhao

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

Recent advances have established a new machine learning paradigm based on scaling up compute at inference time as well as at training time. In that line of work, a combination of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on synthetic demonstrations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Corrado Rainone , Tim Bakker , Roland Memisevic

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Cheng Qian , Emre Can Acikgoz , Qi He , Hongru Wang , Xiusi Chen , Dilek Hakkani-Tür , Gokhan Tur , Heng Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Qihan Ren , Peng Wang , Ruikun Cai , Shuai Shao , Dadi Guo , Yuejin Xie , Yafu Li , Quanshi Zhang , Xia Hu , Jing Shao , Dongrui Liu

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

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in arithmetic and reasoning tasks, by instructing the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Jianhao Huang , Zixuan Wang , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jiayu Wang , Yifei Ming , Zixuan Ke , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Aws Albarghouthi , Frederic Sala

Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

After the pretraining stage of LLMs, techniques such as SFT, RLHF, RLVR, and RFT are applied to enhance instruction-following ability, mitigate undesired responses, improve reasoning capability and enable efficient domain adaptation with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Zhichao Wang , Andy Wong , Ruslan Belkin

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

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