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Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities, often amplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning (RL). Although RL algorithms can substantially improve reasoning, they struggle to expand reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xiangchi Yuan , Xiang Chen , Tong Yu , Dachuan Shi , Can Jin , Wenke Lee , Saayan Mitra

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving. However, existing research predominantly relies on reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 ShaoZhen Liu , Xinting Huang , Houwen Peng , Xin Chen , Xinyang Song , Qi Li , Zhenan Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Zhanming Jie , Peng Sun , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li

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

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

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

Multimodal reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) typically relies on a two-stage process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In standard SFT, all tokens contribute equally to the loss, even though reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Shaked Perek , Ben Wiesel , Avihu Dekel , Nimrod Shabtay , Eli Schwartz

Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Tong Zheng , Hongming Zhang , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoyang Wang , Runpeng Dai , Rui Liu , Huiwen Bao , Chengsong Huang , Heng Huang , Dong Yu

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

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel at comprehending human instructions and demonstrate remarkable results across a broad spectrum of tasks. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF) further refine LLMs by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Ju-Seung Byun , Jiyun Chun , Jihyung Kil , Andrew Perrault

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yaowen Ye , Cassidy Laidlaw , Jacob Steinhardt

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Bo Wang , Qinyuan Cheng , Runyu Peng , Rong Bao , Peiji Li , Qipeng Guo , Linyang Li , Zhiyuan Zeng , Yunhua Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuhao Du , Zhuo Li , Pengyu Cheng , Zhihong Chen , Yuejiao Xie , Xiang Wan , Anningzhe Gao

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