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The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) often need to be tailored for specific applications, requiring the integration of new knowledge or the acquisition of new skills. While full fine-tuning is a powerful adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Bernd Bohnet , Rumen Dangovski , Kevin Swersky , Sherry Moore , Arslan Chaudhry , Kathleen Kenealy , Noah Fiedel

A prevailing view holds that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) memorizes training data and fails to generalize, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) attains broader robustness. We revisit this claim through a systematic evaluation on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiaofeng Lin , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Xuezhou Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Junyu Luo , Xiao Luo , Kaize Ding , Jingyang Yuan , Zhiping Xiao , Ming Zhang

Understanding how language model capabilities transfer from pretraining to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to efficient model development and data curation. In this work, we investigate four core questions: RQ1. To what extent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Simin Fan , Dimitris Paparas , Natasha Noy , Binbin Xiong , Noveen Sachdeva , Berivan Isik

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

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…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Qianxi Li , Yingyue Cao , Jikun Kang , Tianpei Yang , Xi Chen , Jun Jin , Matthew E. Taylor

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

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

Fine-tuning adapts pretrained models for specific tasks but poses the risk of catastrophic forgetting (CF), where critical knowledge from pretraining is overwritten. To address the issue of CF in a general-purpose framework, we propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Runyu Wang , Peng Ping , Zhengyu Guo , Xiaoye Zhang , Quan Shi , Liting Zhou , Tianbo Ji

Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate a vast amount of factual information within their pre-trained weights, as evidenced by their ability to answer diverse questions across different domains. However, this knowledge is inherently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Oded Ovadia , Menachem Brief , Moshik Mishaeli , Oren Elisha

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant popularity in recent years for specialized tasks using prompts due to their low computational cost. Standard methods like prefix tuning utilize special, modifiable tokens that lack…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Asif Mahmud , Md. Shohanur Islam Sobuj , Prakash Bhat , Md Kowsher , Niloofar Yousefi , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Dinesh Khandelwal , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with user intent, yet it is believed to suppress generative diversity. Although this reduction is frequently referenced, formal empirical testing of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Roman Klypa , Oleksandr Cherednichenko

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruiying Peng , Mengyu Yang , Jing Lei , Xiaohui Li , Xueyu Wu , Xinlei Chen

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) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Duygu Nur Yaldiz , Evangelia Spiliopoulou , Zheng Qi , Siddharth Varia , Srikanth Doss , Nikolaos Pappas

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Dan Shi , Zhuowen Han , Simon Ostermann , Renren Jin , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

In recent years, continual learning with pre-training (CLPT) has received widespread interest, instead of its traditional focus of training from scratch. The use of strong pre-trained models (PTMs) can greatly facilitate knowledge transfer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Gengwei Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Guoliang Kang , Ling Chen , Yunchao Wei

Unconstrained fine-tuning of flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models drives dense parameter overwrites, degrading pre-trained capabilities. We present Conservative Supervised Fine-Tuning (ConSFT), an optimization objective that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Tianyi Zhang , Shaopeng Zhai , Haoran Zhang , Fuxian Huang , Qi Zhang