Related papers: On the Non-decoupling of Supervised Fine-tuning an…

Test-time scaling (TTS) for large language models (LLMs) has thus far fallen into two largely separate paradigms: (1) reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize sparse outcome-based rewards, yet suffer from instability and low sample…

Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning, alignment, and task-specific performance. However, ensuring harmlessness in these systems remains a critical challenge, particularly in advanced models like…

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…

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability,…

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework to address the discrepancy between loss functions used during training and the final evaluation metrics to be used at test time. When applied to neural Machine Translation (MT), it…

Current reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully learn single tasks but often generalize poorly to modest perturbations in task domain or training procedure. In this work, we present a decoupled learning strategy for RL that…

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…

Post-training has greatly improved reasoning in frontier vision-language models, yet its gains for perception remain comparatively limited, creating a bottleneck for end-to-end visual reasoning. To investigate this gap, we introduce a…

Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…

This paper explores a scientific question in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): why SFT is broadly effective for small-scale deep neural networks, yet can produce inconsistent or even detrimental effects when applied to large language models…

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…

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

Direct evaluation of LLMs on benchmarks can be misleading because comparatively strong performance may reflect task familiarity rather than capability. The train-before-test approach controls for task familiarity by giving each model…