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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

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

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shulin Huang , Yiran Ding , Junshu Pan , Yue Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Tingyu Xia , Bowen Yu , Kai Dang , An Yang , Yuan Wu , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang , Junyang Lin

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

Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Siyuan Liu , Tinghong Chen , Xinghan Li , Yifei Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories has become a pivotal phase in building large reasoning models. However, how CoT trajectories from different sources influence the generalization performance of models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhaoyi Li , Xiangyu Xi , Zhengyu Chen , Wei Wang , Gangwei Jiang , Ranran Shen , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet it remains unclear whether RL improves medical visual reasoning or mainly sharpens behaviors already induced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ahmadreza Jeddi , Kimia Shaban , Negin Baghbanzadeh , Natasha Sharan , Abhishek Moturu , Elham Dolatabadi , Babak Taati

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are designed to extend Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities, yet in this work we observe a surprising phenomenon: VLMs can outperform their underlying LLMs on purely text-only tasks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Nicolas Buzeta , Felipe del Rio , Cristian Hinostroza , Denis Parra , Hans Lobel , Rodrigo Toro Icarte

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

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable reward, whether large vision-language models (VLMs) can directly inherit such capabilities through similar…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tianle Li , Jihai Zhang , Yongming Rao , Yu Cheng

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

We investigate the robustness of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), finding that the in-distribution gains from fine-tuning correspond to a large drop in out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Joe Stacey , Lisa Alazraki , Aran Ubhi , Beyza Ermis , Aaron Mueller , Marek Rei

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Dinesh Khandelwal , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

Large code datasets have become increasingly accessible for pre-training source code models. However, for the fine-tuning phase, obtaining representative training data that fully covers the code distribution for specific downstream tasks…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Hossein Hajipour , Ning Yu , Cristian-Alexandru Staicu , Mario Fritz

Visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods often require extensive amounts of data. As opposed to model-free RL, model-based RL (MBRL) offers a potential solution with efficient data utilization through planning. Additionally, RL lacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Joschka Boedecker