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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities under the widely adopted SFT+RLVR paradigm, which first performs Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on human-annotated reasoning trajectories (rationales) to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Ping Luo

Reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF) is a popular paradigm for improving the instruction-following abilities of powerful pre-trained language models. RLAIF first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using demonstrations from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Archit Sharma , Sedrick Keh , Eric Mitchell , Chelsea Finn , Kushal Arora , Thomas Kollar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Renfei Zhang , Manasa Kaniselvan , Niloofar Mireshghallah

Post-training has become essential for adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex downstream behaviors, including instruction following, preference alignment, and multi-step reasoning. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Chengqian Zhang , Wei Zhu , Kyumin Lee

Preference learning provides a promising solution to address the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for code language models, where the model is not explicitly trained to differentiate between correct and incorrect code. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Dylan Zhang , Shizhe Diao , Xueyan Zou , Hao Peng

Instruct LLM provide a paradigm used in large scale language model to align LLM to human preference. The paradigm contains supervised fine tuning and reinforce learning from human feedback. This paradigm is also used in downstream scenarios…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Shiming Xie , Hong Chen , Fred Yu , Zeye Sun , Xiuyu Wu

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Test-time scaling has proven effective in further enhancing the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). However, mainstream post-training methods (i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuyang Xu , Yi Cheng , Haochao Ying , Zhuoyun Du , Renjun Hu , Xing Shi , Wei Lin , Jian Wu

Existing post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) methods; the former is stable during training but suffers from limited generalization, while the latter, despite its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Daoan Zhang , Guangchen Lan , Dong-Jun Han , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoman Pan , Hongming Zhang , Mingxiao Li , Pengcheng Chen , Yu Dong , Christopher Brinton , Jiebo Luo

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for sharpening strategic tool use capabilities of LLMs on long-horizon, sparsely-rewarded agent tasks, yet it faces a fundamental challenge of exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, most modern RL algorithms were designed to target robotics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Lianghuan Huang , Shuo Li , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well in single-image visual grounding but struggle with real-world tasks that demand cross-image reasoning and multi-modal instructions. To address this, we adopt a reinforcement learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Bob Zhang , Haoran Li , Tao Zhang , Jianan Li , Cilin Yan , Xikai Liu , Jiayin Cai , Yanbin Hao

The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, SFT introduces distributional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sudong Wang , Weiquan Huang , Xiaomin Yu , Zuhao Yang , Hehai Lin , Keming Wu , Chaojun Xiao , Chen Chen , Wenxuan Wang , Beier Zhu , Yunjian Zhang , Chengwei Qin

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward…

As language models accelerate scientific research by automating hypothesis generation and implementation, a new bottleneck emerges: evaluating and filtering hundreds of AI-generated ideas without exhaustive experimentation. We ask whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Srujan P Mule , Aniketh Garikaparthi , Manasi Patwardhan

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to fix bugs by generating patches. And existing work has demonstrated that "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm enables Large Language Models (LLMs) improve fixing capabilities on APR. However,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Guochang Li , Chen Zhi , Jialiang Chen , Junxiao Han , Shuiguang Deng

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun