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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

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits broad capabilities, yet, for specific tasks or domains their attainment of higher accuracy and more reliable reasoning generally depends on post-training through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haitao Jiang , Wenbo Zhang , Jiarui Yao , Hengrui Cai , Sheng Wang , Rui Song

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

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has enhanced the reasoning of large-scale language models (LLMs), its efficacy for lightweight multimodal language models (MLLMs) with fewer than seven billion parameters remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Linyu Ou , YuYang Yin

Instruction Fine-Tuning enhances pre-trained language models from basic next-word prediction to complex instruction-following. However, existing One-off Instruction Fine-Tuning (One-off IFT) method, applied on a diverse instruction, may not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Wei Pang , Chuan Zhou , Xiao-Hua Zhou , Xiaojie Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

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

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shengyu Zhang , Linfeng Dong , Xiaoya Li , Sen Zhang , Xiaofei Sun , Shuhe Wang , Jiwei Li , Runyi Hu , Tianwei Zhang , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- instead of perplexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Tianyu Gao , Alexander Wettig , Howard Yen , Danqi Chen

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

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, with post-training playing a crucial role in enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Among post-training paradigms, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used: it leverages…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Lisong Sun , Li Wang , Chen Zhang , Jinyang Wu , Kui Zhang , Tianhao Peng , Wenjun Wu

While critical for alignment, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) incurs the risk of catastrophic forgetting, yet the layer-wise emergence of instruction-following capabilities remains elusive. We investigate this mechanism via a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Qinghua Zhao , Xueling Gong , Xinyu Chen , Zhongfeng Kang , Xinlu Li

We present a controlled study of how dataset contamination interacts with the post-training stages now standard in large language model training pipelines. Starting from clean checkpoints of Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B) and Gemma3 (1B/4B), we inject…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Muhammed Yusuf Kocyigit , Caglar Yildirim

Packing, initially utilized in the pre-training phase, is an optimization technique designed to maximize hardware resource efficiency by combining different training sequences to fit the model's maximum input length. Although it has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Shuhe Wang , Guoyin Wang , Yizhong Wang , Jiwei Li , Eduard Hovy , Chen Guo

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision has become a common strategy to enhance reasoning in language models. While effective for large models, we identify a phenomenon we call Long CoT Degradation, in which small language models (SLMs;…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Renjie Luo , Jiaxi Li , Chen Huang , Wei Lu

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 2024-09-10 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Mayank Mishra , Gaurav Pandey , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

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:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Junyou Su , He Zhu , Xiao Luo , Liyu Zhang , Hong-Yu Zhou , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in generating human-like text, proving to be a valuable asset across various applications. However, adapting these models to incorporate new, out-of-domain…

Recent supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have significantly improved language models' performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, even when models are trained at a small scale. However, the specific capabilities enhanced through such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yiyou Sun , Georgia Zhou , Haoyue Bai , Hao Wang , Dacheng Li , Nouha Dziri , Dawn Song