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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

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jinghan Jia , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yan Ma , Steffi Chern , Xuyang Shen , Yiran Zhong , Pengfei Liu

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Song Lai , Haohan Zhao , Rong Feng , Changyi Ma , Wenzhuo Liu , Hongbo Zhao , Xi Lin , Dong Yi , Qingfu Zhang , Hongbin Liu , Gaofeng Meng , Fei Zhu

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

Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT), a recently proposed Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, has attracted widespread attention for significantly improving parameter efficiency by editing representation space alone. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Chenxi Huang , Shaotian Yan , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Sinan Fan , Yue Xin , Deng Cai , Chen Shen , Jieping Ye

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

Large language models are increasingly adapted to downstream tasks through fine-tuning. Full supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), are two dominant approaches.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Darshita Rathore , Vineet Kumar , Chetna Bansal , Anindya Moitra

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

Training Large Reasoning Model (LRM) is usually unstable and unpredictable, especially on hard problems or weak foundation models. We found that the current post-training scaling strategy can still improve on these cases. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yutong Chen , Jiandong Gao , Ji Wu

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Caiyue Xu , Chenfei Liu , Liting Zhang , Yuhang Jia , Yanzhe Zhang , Hualong Yu , Zichen Xu , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Lai Wei , Yuting Li , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Linghe Kong , Weiran Huang , Lichao Sun

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

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a dominant paradigm for deploying LLMs in multi-task scenarios due to its extreme parameter efficiency. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based LoRA variants have achieved promising results by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jia-Chen Zhang , Zhen-Wei Yan , Yu-Jie Xiong , Chun-Ming Xia

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

Recent mixed-policy optimization methods for LLM reasoning that interleave or blend supervised and reinforcement learning signals report improvements over the standard SFT-then-RL pipeline. We show that numerous recently published research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Alexis Limozin , Eduard Durech , Torsten Hoefler , Imanol Schlag , Valentina Pyatkin

While reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective for general reasoning in vision-language models, its application to tasks requiring deep understanding of information-rich images and structured output generation remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Lei Chen , Xuanle Zhao , Zhixiong Zeng , Jing Huang , Liming Zheng , Yufeng Zhong , Lin Ma