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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

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) to new domains. In this work, we improve the statistical efficiency of SFT by selecting an informative subset of training examples. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rohan Deb , Kiran Thekumparampil , Kousha Kalantari , Gaurush Hiranandani , Shoham Sabach , Branislav Kveton

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) component has become significant for complex reasoning tasks. However, in conventional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), the model could allocate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Xiaofeng Shi , Qian Kou , Yuduo Li , Hua Zhou

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial not only for unlocking their potential in specific tasks but also for ensuring that responses meet human expectations and adhere to safety and ethical principles. Current alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Ruijun Chen , Jiehao Liang , Shiping Gao , Fanqi Wan , Xiaojun Quan

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong

Improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) typically requires supervised fine-tuning with labeled data or computationally expensive sampling. We introduce Unsupervised Prefix Fine-Tuning (UPFT), which leverages the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Ke Ji , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Qiuzhi Liu , Zhiwei He , Xingyu Chen , Xiaoyuan Liu , Zhijie Wang , Junying Chen , Benyou Wang , Zhaopeng Tu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang

Multimodal large language models are typically trained end-to-end to predict ground-truth answers, yet supervision signals are applied exclusively to text tokens. Visual tokens, the core carriers of visual information, are optimized only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Jianfei Zhao , Feng Zhang , Xin Sun , Chong Feng , Bing Wang , Zhixing Tan

Data quality plays a critical role in enhancing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for large language models (LLMs), and token-level data selection has emerged as a promising direction for its fine-grained nature. Despite their strong empirical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Xiaohan Qin , Xiaoxing Wang , Ning Liao , Cancheng Zhang , Xiangdong Zhang , Mingquan Feng , Jingzhi Wang , Junchi Yan

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) adapts pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to domain-specific instructions by training on a carefully curated subset of high-quality instruction-response pairs, typically drawn from a larger dataset that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zile Yang , Ling Li , Na Di , Jinlong Pang , Yao Zhou , Hao Cheng , Bo Han , Jiaheng Wei

This paper studies "unsupervised finetuning", the symmetrical problem of the well-known "supervised finetuning". Given a pretrained model and small-scale unlabeled target data, unsupervised finetuning is to adapt the representation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Suichan Li , Dongdong Chen , Yinpeng Chen , Lu Yuan , Lei Zhang , Qi Chu , Bin Liu , Nenghai Yu

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Muxi Diao , Lele Yang , Wuxuan Gong , Yutong Zhang , Zhonghao Yan , Yufei Han , Kongming Liang , Weiran Xu , Zhanyu Ma

Image-text training like CLIP has dominated the pretraining of vision foundation models in recent years. Subsequent efforts have been made to introduce region-level visual learning into CLIP's pretraining but face scalability challenges due…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Xiaohu Jiang , Yixiao Ge , Yuying Ge , Dachuan Shi , Chun Yuan , Ying Shan

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shengyu Zhang , Linfeng Dong , Xiaoya Li , Sen Zhang , Xiaofei Sun , Shuhe Wang , Jiwei Li , Runyi Hu , Tianwei Zhang , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang