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Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

As the landscape of large language models expands, efficiently finetuning for specific tasks becomes increasingly crucial. At the same time, the landscape of parameter-efficient finetuning methods rapidly expands. Consequently,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tobias Strangmann , Lennart Purucker , Jörg K. H. Franke , Ivo Rapant , Fabio Ferreira , Frank Hutter

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

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

Transfer learning has fundamentally changed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) research. Many existing state-of-the-art models are first pre-trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Haoming Jiang , Pengcheng He , Weizhu Chen , Xiaodong Liu , Jianfeng Gao , Tuo Zhao

Continual learning (CL) studies how models acquire tasks sequentially while retaining previously learned knowledge. Despite substantial progress in benchmarking CL methods, comparative evaluations typically keep the fine-tuning regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Paul-Tiberiu Iordache , Elena Burceanu

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on domain-specific data is the dominant approach for adapting foundation models to specialized tasks. However, it has been observed that SFT models tend to forget knowledge acquired during pretraining. In vision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Xingyuan Pan , Hanning Zhang , Chenlu Ye , Rui Pan , Tong Zhang

To acquire instruction-following capabilities, large language models (LLMs) undergo instruction tuning, where they are trained on instruction-response pairs using next-token prediction (NTP). Efforts to improve instruction tuning often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuxin Xiao , Shujian Zhang , Wenxuan Zhou , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Sanqiang Zhao

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

Image-text training like CLIP has dominated the pretraining of vision foundation models in recent years. Subsequent efforts have been made to introduce region-level visual learning into CLIP's pretraining but face scalability challenges due…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Xiaohu Jiang , Yixiao Ge , Yuying Ge , Dachuan Shi , Chun Yuan , Ying Shan

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Muxi Diao , Lele Yang , Wuxuan Gong , Yutong Zhang , Zhonghao Yan , Yufei Han , Kongming Liang , Weiran Xu , Zhanyu Ma

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning

Self-supervised pre-training of large-scale transformer models on text corpora followed by finetuning has achieved state-of-the-art on a number of natural language processing tasks. Recently, Lu et al. (2021, arXiv:2103.05247) claimed that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Danielle Rothermel , Margaret Li , Tim Rocktäschel , Jakob Foerster

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has become a core paradigm for post-training large language models, yet its training process remains highly fragile. Existing efforts mainly improve reliability at the system level or address specific issues…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Lingzhe Zhang , Tong Jia , Yunpeng Zhai , Liancheng Fang , Kening Zheng , Hongyi Liu , Xiaosong Huang , Philip S. Yu , Ying Li

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

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Lucas Bandarkar , Nanyun Peng

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Qianxi Li , Yingyue Cao , Jikun Kang , Tianpei Yang , Xi Chen , Jun Jin , Matthew E. Taylor

Designing agents that acquire knowledge autonomously and use it to solve new tasks efficiently is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Knowledge acquired during an unsupervised pre-training phase is often transferred by…

Confidence calibration, which aims to make model predictions equal to the true correctness measures, is important for neural machine translation (NMT) because it is able to offer useful indicators of translation errors in the generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Shuo Wang , Zhaopeng Tu , Shuming Shi , Yang Liu

Pre-training has been a popular learning paradigm in deep learning era, especially in annotation-insufficient scenario. Better ImageNet pre-trained models have been demonstrated, from the perspective of architecture, by previous research to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Andong Deng , Xingjian Li , Di Hu , Tianyang Wang , Haoyi Xiong , Chengzhong Xu