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Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Chengyu Du , Jinyi Han , Yizhou Ying , Aili Chen , Qianyu He , Haokun Zhao , Sirui Xia , Haoran Guo , Jiaqing Liang , Zulong Chen , Liangyue Li , Yanghua Xiao

Recent supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have significantly improved language models' performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, even when models are trained at a small scale. However, the specific capabilities enhanced through such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yiyou Sun , Georgia Zhou , Haoyue Bai , Hao Wang , Dacheng Li , Nouha Dziri , Dawn Song

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Heshan Fernando , Han Shen , Parikshit Ram , Yi Zhou , Horst Samulowitz , Nathalie Baracaldo , Tianyi Chen

Recent advancements in LLM post-training, particularly through reinforcement learning and preference optimization, are key to boosting their reasoning capabilities. However, these methods often suffer from low sample efficiency and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zichuan Liu , Jinyu Wang , Lei Song , Jiang Bian

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) has been a go-to and effective method for enhancing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in relatively small LLMs by fine-tuning them with long CoT responses from larger LLMs. To continually improve reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Wang Yang , Hongye Jin , Jingfeng Yang , Vipin Chaudhary , Xiaotian Han

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yiming Ju , Ziyi Ni , Xingrun Xing , Zhixiong Zeng , hanyu Zhao , Siqi Fan , Zheng Zhang

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yishu Wei , Yi Lin , Adam Flanders , George Shih , Yifan Peng

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

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has the potential to solve complex long horizon tasks using temporal abstraction and increased exploration. However, hierarchical agents are difficult to train due to inherent non-stationarity. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Utsav Singh , Vinay P. Namboodiri

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

Recent AI advancements, such as OpenAI's new models, are transforming LLMs into LRMs (Large Reasoning Models) that perform reasoning during inference, taking extra time and compute for higher-quality outputs. We aim to uncover the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Guanghao Ye , Khiem Duc Pham , Xinzhi Zhang , Sivakanth Gopi , Baolin Peng , Beibin Li , Janardhan Kulkarni , Huseyin A. Inan

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 2024-09-10 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Mayank Mishra , Gaurav Pandey , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Current methods for training self-correction typically depend on either multiple…

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…

Recent studies have shown that supervised fine-tuning of LLMs on a small number of high-quality datasets can yield strong reasoning capabilities. However, full fine-tuning (Full FT), while powerful, is computationally expensive and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zihang Liu , Tianyu Pang , Oleg Balabanov , Chaoqun Yang , Tianjin Huang , Lu Yin , Yaoqing Yang , Shiwei Liu

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

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