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Pretraining is a common technique in deep learning for increasing performance and reducing training time, with promising experimental results in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, pretraining requires a relevant dataset for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Saurav Kadavath , Samuel Paradis , Brian Yao

Recent successes of reinforcement learning (RL) in training large reasoning models motivate the question of whether self-training - the process where a model learns from its own judgments - can be sustained within RL. In this work, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Sheikh Shafayat , Fahim Tajwar , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Jeff Schneider , Andrea Zanette

The prevailing paradigm for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs revolves around post-training on high-quality, reasoning-intensive data. While emerging literature suggests that reasoning data is increasingly incorporated also during…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically developed through large-scale pre-training followed by task-specific fine-tuning. Recent advances highlight the importance of an intermediate mid-training stage, where models undergo multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Kaixiang Mo , Yuxin Shi , Weiwei Weng , Zhiqiang Zhou , Shuman Liu , Haibo Zhang , Anxiang Zeng

The emergence of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) has achieved tremendous success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by learning universal representations on large corpora in a self-supervised manner. The pre-trained models…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Peng Liu , Lemei Zhang , Jon Atle Gulla

The emergence of pre-trained models has significantly impacted Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision to relational datasets. Traditionally, these models are assessed through fine-tuned downstream tasks. However, this raises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Prince Aboagye , Yan Zheng , Junpeng Wang , Uday Singh Saini , Xin Dai , Michael Yeh , Yujie Fan , Zhongfang Zhuang , Shubham Jain , Liang Wang , Wei Zhang

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for flexible decision making and control, but requires extensive data collection for each new task that an agent needs to learn. In other machine learning fields, such as natural language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Avi Singh , Huihan Liu , Gaoyue Zhou , Albert Yu , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine

Standard training pipelines for large language models (LLMs) are typically unidirectional, progressing from pre-training to post-training. However, the potential for a bidirectional process--where insights from post-training retroactively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Junjie Huang , Jiarui Qin , Di Yin , Weiwen Liu , Yong Yu , Xing Sun , Weinan Zhang

Large Language Models have achieved remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, motivating research into how this ability evolves during training. Prior work has primarily analyzed this evolution via explicit generation outcomes, treating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Siyuan Zhang , Jialian Li , Yichi Zhang , Xiao Yang , Yinpeng Dong , Hang Su

He et al. (2018) have called into question the utility of pre-training by showing that training from scratch can often yield similar performance to pre-training. We show that although pre-training may not improve performance on traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Dan Hendrycks , Kimin Lee , Mantas Mazeika

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Sinong Wang , Madian Khabsa , Hao Ma

The development of state-of-the-art large language models is commonly understood as a two-stage process involving pre-training and post-training. We point out the need for an additional intermediate stage called reinforcement mid-training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yijun Tian , Shaoyu Chen , Zhichao Xu , Yawei Wang , Jinhe Bi , Peng Han , Wei Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

As language models have scaled both their number of parameters and pretraining dataset sizes, the computational cost for pretraining has become intractable except for the most well-resourced teams. This increasing cost makes it ever more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Jupinder Parmar , Sanjev Satheesh , Mostofa Patwary , Mohammad Shoeybi , Bryan Catanzaro

The pre-training phase of language models often begins with randomly initialized parameters. With the current trends in scaling models, training their large number of parameters can be extremely slow and costly. In contrast, small language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Mohammad Samragh , Iman Mirzadeh , Keivan Alizadeh Vahid , Fartash Faghri , Minsik Cho , Moin Nabi , Devang Naik , Mehrdad Farajtabar

Recent curriculum techniques in the post-training stage of LLMs have been empirically observed to outperform non-curriculum approaches in improving reasoning performance, yet a principled understanding of their effectiveness and limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Hau-San Wong , Qingfu Zhang , Taiji Suzuki

How can we train models whose post-trained capabilities survive subsequent fine-tuning? Rather than focusing on downstream interventions to mitigate forgetting of upstream capabilities, we study how upstream training choices - that is, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Lawrence Feng , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Jacob Mitchell Springer , Ziqian Zhong , Aditi Raghunathan

Recent developments in natural language representations have been accompanied by large and expensive models that leverage vast amounts of general-domain text through self-supervised pre-training. Due to the cost of applying such models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Iulia Turc , Ming-Wei Chang , Kenton Lee , Kristina Toutanova

Language models achieve impressive performance on a variety of knowledge, language, and reasoning tasks due to the scale and diversity of pretraining data available. The standard training recipe is a two-stage paradigm: pretraining first on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Skyler Seto , Pierre Ablin , Anastasiia Filippova , Jiayuan Ye , Louis Bethune , Angelos Katharopoulos , David Grangier

The recent rapid progress in pre-training Large Language Models has relied on using self-supervised language modeling objectives like next token prediction or span corruption. On the other hand, Machine Translation Systems are mostly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Andrea Schioppa , Xavier Garcia , Orhan Firat