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Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Geyang Guo , Ranchi Zhao , Tianyi Tang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a pivotal approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks; however, performance often suffers from the ``seesaw phenomenon'', where indiscriminate parameter updates yield progress on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yao Wang , Di Liang , Minlong Peng

Conventionally, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is treated as a simple imitation learning process that only trains a policy to imitate expert behavior on demonstration datasets. In this work, we challenge this view by establishing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Jiangnan Li , Thuy-Trang Vu , Ehsan Abbasnejad , Gholamreza Haffari

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Junyu Luo , Xiao Luo , Kaize Ding , Jingyang Yuan , Zhiping Xiao , Ming Zhang

Attention mechanism is a fundamental component of the transformer model and plays a significant role in its success. However, the theoretical understanding of how attention learns to select tokens is still an emerging area of research. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Keitaro Sakamoto , Issei Sato

Although LLMs have demonstrated improved performance by scaling parallel test-time compute, doing so relies on generating reasoning paths that are both diverse and accurate. For challenging problems, the forking tokens that trigger diverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sheng Jia , Xiao Wang , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

Fine-grained image classification involves identifying different subcategories of a class which possess very subtle discriminatory features. Fine-grained datasets usually provide bounding box annotations along with class labels to aid the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Farha Al Breiki , Muhammad Ridzuan , Rushali Grandhe

Foundation models have recently gained attention within the field of machine learning thanks to its efficiency in broad data processing. While researchers had attempted to extend this success to time series models, the main challenge is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Trang H. Tran , Lam M. Nguyen , Kyongmin Yeo , Nam Nguyen , Roman Vaculin

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the standard post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, the conventional SFT process, driven by Cross-Entropy (CE) loss, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yijie Chen , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruiying Peng , Mengyu Yang , Jing Lei , Xiaohui Li , Xueyu Wu , Xinlei Chen

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought data is an essential post-training step for reasoning language models. Standard machine learning intuition suggests that training with more unique training samples yields better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dawid J. Kopiczko , Sagar Vaze , Tijmen Blankevoort , Yuki M. Asano

Post-training of Large Language Models often involves a pipeline of Supervised Finetuning (SFT) followed by Preference Finetuning (PFT) using methods like Direct Preference Optimization. Both stages require annotated data that are very…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Mohit Raghavendra , Junmo Kang , Alan Ritter

Text-to-image diffusion models often face a severe trilemma in human portrait generation: text-image alignment, photorealism, and human-perceived aesthetics inherently inhibit one another. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yunlong Wang , Jinjin Shi , Wenbin Gao , Xuran Xu , Runyu Shi , Ying Huang

Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) have recently shown strong in-context learning capabilities on structured data, achieving zero-shot performance comparable to traditional machine learning methods. We find that zero-shot TFMs already achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Aditya Tanna , Pratinav Seth , Mohamed Bouadi , Vinay Kumar Sankarapu

In a controllable text generation dataset, there exist unannotated attributes that could provide irrelevant learning signals to models that use it for training and thus degrade their performance. We propose focused prefix tuning(FPT) to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Congda Ma , Tianyu Zhao , Makoto Shing , Kei Sawada , Manabu Okumura

We introduce Tangent Attention Fine-Tuning (TAFT), a method for fine-tuning linearized transformers obtained by computing a First-order Taylor Expansion around a pre-trained initialization. We show that the Jacobian-Vector Product resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Tian Yu Liu , Aditya Golatkar , Stefano Soatto

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) improves in-domain performance but can degrade out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Prior work suggests that this degradation is related to changes in dominant singular subspaces of pretrained weight matrices.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hangzhan Jin , Tianwei Ni , Lu Li , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Mohammad Hamdaqa , Doina Precup

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