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Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…

There are many computer vision applications including object segmentation, classification, object detection, and reconstruction for which machine learning (ML) shows state-of-the-art performance. Nowadays, we can build ML tools for such…

Recent empirical studies have explored the idea of continuing to train a model at test-time for a given task, known as test-time training (TTT), and have found it to yield significant performance improvements. However, there is limited…

A dominant assumption in Multimodal Language Model (MLLM) research is that its performance is largely inherited from the LLM backbone, given its immense parameter scale and remarkable capabilities. This has created a void in the…

Test data is said to be out-of-distribution (OOD) when it unexpectedly differs from the training data, a common challenge in real-world use cases of machine learning. Although OOD generalisation has gained interest in recent years, few…

Despite being highly over-parametrized, and having the ability to fully interpolate the training data, deep networks are known to generalize well to unseen data. It is now understood that part of the reason for this is that the training…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become the de facto post-training strategy for large vision-language-action (VLA) models, but its reliance on costly human demonstrations limits scalability and generalization. We propose Probe, Learn,…

Large language model post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and distillation are often analyzed through their loss functions: maximum likelihood, policy gradients, forward KL, reverse KL, or…

Visual reasoning abilities play a crucial role in understanding complex multimodal data, advancing both domain-specific applications and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Existing methods enhance Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive performance on various vision tasks, yet their generalization under distribution shifts (DS) is rarely understood. In this work, we comprehensively study the out-of-distribution (OOD)…

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…

Recently, learning a model that generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, after defining OOD generalization via Wasserstein distance, we theoretically…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

A common explanation for the failure of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is that the model trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) learns spurious features instead of invariant features. However, several recent studies…

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…

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization in machine learning is a burgeoning area of study. Its primary goal is to enhance the adaptability and resilience of machine learning models when faced with new, unseen, and potentially adversarial…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt…

Existing vision-language models exhibit strong generalization on a variety of visual domains and tasks. However, such models mainly perform zero-shot recognition in a closed-set manner, and thus struggle to handle open-domain visual…

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…