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Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

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 a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Tao Liu , Taiqiang Wu , Runming Yang , Shaoning Sun , Junjie Wang , Yujiu Yang

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) to new domains. In this work, we improve the statistical efficiency of SFT by selecting an informative subset of training examples. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rohan Deb , Kiran Thekumparampil , Kousha Kalantari , Gaurush Hiranandani , Shoham Sabach , Branislav Kveton

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) require post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-response pairs to enable instruction following. However, this process can potentially harm existing capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Yihan Wang , Andrew Bai , Nanyun Peng , Cho-Jui Hsieh

There is growing evidence that pretrained language models improve task-specific fine-tuning not just for the languages seen in pretraining, but also for new languages and even non-linguistic data. What is the nature of this surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Zhengxuan Wu , Nelson F. Liu , Christopher Potts

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameters emerge diverse abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Guanting Dong , Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Chengpeng Li , Mingfeng Xue , Dayiheng Liu , Wei Wang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

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

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) component has become significant for complex reasoning tasks. However, in conventional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), the model could allocate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Xiaofeng Shi , Qian Kou , Yuduo Li , Hua Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common approach to improve the domain-specific question-answering (QA) performance of large language models (LLMs). However, recent literature reveals that due to the conflicts between LLMs' internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Qihuang Zhong , Liang Ding , Xiantao Cai , Juhua Liu , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

While metrics available during pre-training, such as perplexity, correlate well with model performance at scaling-laws studies, their predictive capacities at a fixed model size remain unclear, hindering effective model selection and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Hansi Zeng , Kai Hui , Honglei Zhuang , Zhen Qin , Zhenrui Yue , Hamed Zamani , Dana Alon

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Mohit Raghavendra , Vaskar Nath , Sean Hendryx

Large language models may encounter factual knowledge during pre-training yet fail to reliably use that knowledge after fine-tuning. Despite growing empirical evidence that MLP layers store factual associations and fine-tuning affects…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ruichen Xu , Kexin Chen

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a common method for fine-tuning large language models, where a base model can serve multiple users through PEFT module switching. To enhance user experience, base models require periodic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Naibin Gu , Peng Fu , Xiyu Liu , Ke Ma , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang

A prevailing view holds that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) memorizes training data and fails to generalize, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) attains broader robustness. We revisit this claim through a systematic evaluation on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiaofeng Lin , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Xuezhou Zhang

We compare sequential fine-tuning with a model for multi-task learning in the context where we are interested in boosting performance on two tasks, one of which depends on the other. We test these models on the FigLang2022 shared task which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Irina Bigoulaeva , Rachneet Sachdeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Aline Villavicencio , Iryna Gurevych

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

In recent years, pre-trained large language models have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks. Besides the pivotal role of self-supervised pre-training, their effectiveness in downstream applications also depends critically on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Qi Zhang , Yifei Wang , Xiaohan Wang , Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Yisen Wang