Related papers: Learning While Staying Curious: Entropy-Preserving…

R1-style Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet the mechanism behind rule-based RL remains unclear. We found that small-scale SFT has substantial influence on RL but shows poor…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where…

Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models. While on-policy reinforcement learning can reduce forgetting, it…

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity:…

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently fine-tuned through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance performance in specific domains. Better results can be achieved by distilling the chain-of-thought of a larger model at…

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances overall accuracy (pass@1) but often fails to improve capability (pass@k) of LLMs in reasoning tasks, while distillation can improve both. In this…

Large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 and their distilled variants achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, distilling these models often demands large-scale data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), motivating the…

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

Previous study suggest that powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) only refines reasoning path without improving the reasoning capacity in math tasks while…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has played an important role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Some studies apply RL directly to \textit{smaller} base models (known as zero-RL) and also achieve notable…

Post-training methods, especially Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), play an important role in improving large language models' (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities. However, the dominant two-stage pipeline (SFT…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Since the advent of reasoning-based large language models, many have found great success from distilling reasoning capabilities into student models. Such techniques have significantly bridged the gap between reasoning and standard LLMs on…

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.…

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

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…

Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance,…