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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

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

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

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gaotang Li , Ruizhong Qiu , Xiusi Chen , Heng Ji , Hanghang Tong

Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiwen Ruan , Yixia Li , He Zhu , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua 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

The transition from fitting empirical data to achieving true human utility is fundamentally constrained by a granularity mismatch, where fine-grained autoregressive generation is often supervised by coarse or uniform signals. This position…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhanming Shen , Zeyu Qin , Jiaqi Hu , Wentao Ye , Hao Chen , Xiaomeng Hu , Haokai Xu , Gang Chen , Yi R. Fung , Haobo Wang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yuqian Fu , Tinghong Chen , Jiajun Chai , Xihuai Wang , Songjun Tu , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Qi Liu , Mingdi Sun , Yongyi He , Zhi Zheng , Tong Xu , Yi Zheng , Zhefeng Wang , Enhong Chen

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

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories demonstrations is a common approach for enabling reasoning in large language models. Standard practices typically only retain trajectories with correct final answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xueyun Tian , Minghua Ma , Bingbing Xu , Nuoyan Lyu , Wei Li , Heng Dong , Zheng Chu , Yuanzhuo Wang , Huawei Shen

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

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, but developing high-performing models for specialized applications often requires substantial human annotation -- a process that is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Abhinav Arabelly , Jagrut Nemade , Robert D Nowak , Jifan Zhang

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

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
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