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Instruction Fine-tuning~(IFT) is a critical phase in building large language models~(LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Mengjie Ren , Boxi Cao , Hongyu Lin , Cao Liu , Xianpei Han , Ke Zeng , Guanglu Wan , Xunliang Cai , Le Sun

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as "agents" for decision-making (DM) in interactive and dynamic environments. Yet, since they were not originally designed for DM, recent studies show that LLMs can struggle even in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Chanwoo Park , Ziyang Chen , Asuman Ozdaglar , Kaiqing Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently shown impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, often by engaging in self-reflective behaviors such as self-critique and backtracking. However, not all reflections are beneficial-many are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hanbin Wang , Jingwei Song , Jinpeng Li , Qi Zhu , Fei Mi , Ganqu Cui , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the standard post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, the conventional SFT process, driven by Cross-Entropy (CE) loss, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yijie Chen , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng

Explorations in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), have made impressive progress. However, most approaches rely on explicit weight updates, overlooking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Mingyuan Zhang , Yue Bai , Yifan Wang , Yiyang Huang , Yun Fu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) can improve the quality of large language model's (LLM) outputs by aligning them with human preferences. We propose a simple algorithm for aligning LLMs with human preferences inspired by…

Fine-tuning pretrained models is a standard and effective workflow in modern machine learning. However, robust fine-tuning (RFT), which aims to simultaneously achieve adaptation to a downstream task and robustness to adversarial examples,…

Deep reinforcement learning policies achieve strong performance in complex continuous control environments with nonlinear contact forces. However, these policies often produce chaotic state dynamics, with trivially small changes to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rory Young , Nicolas Pugeault

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Although supervised finetuning (SFT) has emerged as an essential technique to align large language models with humans, it is considered superficial, with style learning being its nature. At the same time, recent works indicate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Ming Shen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common approach to improve the domain-specific question-answering (QA) performance of large language models (LLMs). However, recent literature reveals that due to the conflicts between LLMs' internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Qihuang Zhong , Liang Ding , Xiantao Cai , Juhua Liu , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

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

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a pivotal approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks; however, performance often suffers from the ``seesaw phenomenon'', where indiscriminate parameter updates yield progress on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yao Wang , Di Liang , Minlong Peng

Parameter-Efficient finetuning (PEFT) enhances model performance on downstream tasks by updating a minimal subset of parameters. Representation finetuning (ReFT) methods further improve efficiency by freezing model weights and optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Sirui Liang , Pengfei Cao , Jian Zhao , Cong Huang , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

The rapid progress in diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) generation has created an urgent need for interpretable automatic evaluation methods that can assess the quality of generated images, therefore reducing the human annotation burden.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zi-Ao Ma , Tian Lan , Rong-Cheng Tu , Shu-Hang Liu , Heyan Huang , Zhijing Wu , Chen Xu , Xian-Ling Mao

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