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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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jie Chen , Xintian Han , Yu Ma , Xun Zhou , Liang Xiang

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

Cross-entropy (CE) training provides dense and scalable supervision for language models, but it optimizes next-token prediction under teacher forcing rather than sequence-level behavior under model rollouts. We introduce a feature-matching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Samy Jelassi , Mujin Kwun , Rosie Zhao , Yuanzhi Li , Nicolo Fusi , Yilun Du , Sham M. Kakade , Carles Domingo-Enrich

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

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

When large language models are fine-tuned to generate persona- or tone-conditioned responses, their output diversity is severely limited--a failure we term Cross-Style Collapse. We trace this collapse to the cross-entropy objective, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kerui Peng , Feifei Li , Xingyu Fan , Wenhui Que

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been pivotal in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from limited exploration and entropy collapse, where models exploit a narrow set of solutions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shijia Kang , Muhan Zhang

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Andrey Goncharov , Daniil Vyazhev , Petr Sychev , Edvard Khalafyan , Alexey Zaytsev

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

Post-training of large language models involves a fundamental trade-off between supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which efficiently mimics demonstrations but tends to memorize, and reinforcement learning (RL), which achieves better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 He Zhu , Junyou Su , Peng Lai , Ren Ma , Wenjia Zhang , Linyi Yang , Guanhua Chen

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common method to enhance the tool calling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with the training data often being synthesized. The current data synthesis process generally involves sampling a set…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zezhong Wang , Xingshan Zeng , Weiwen Liu , Liangyou Li , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu , Kam-Fai Wong

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