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Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wenqiao Zhu , Ji Liu , Rongjuncheng Zhang , Haipang Wu , Yulun Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) are the two dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance on downstream tasks. While RL generally preserves broader model capabilities (retention) better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan , Zijie Liu , Zhen Tan , Charles Fleming , Tianlong Chen

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

We have witnessed that strong LLMs like Qwen-Math, MiMo, and Phi-4 possess immense reasoning potential inherited from the pre-training stage. With reinforcement learning (RL), these models can improve dramatically on reasoning tasks. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yubo Wang , Ping Nie , Kai Zou , Lijun Wu , Wenhu Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yishu Wei , Yi Lin , Adam Flanders , George Shih , Yifan Peng

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

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Large vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly adopt post-training techniques such as long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to elicit sophisticated reasoning. While these methods exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Jierun Chen , Tiezheng Yu , Haoli Bai , Lewei Yao , Jiannan Wu , Kaican Li , Fei Mi , Chaofan Tao , Lei Zhu , Manyi Zhang , Xiaohui Li , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Qun Liu

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jing Liang , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Shuyue Hu , Lei Bai , Jianye Hao

Comparison of fine-tuning models with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) reveals that, despite similar performance at a new task, RL preserves prior knowledge and capabilities significantly better. We find that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Idan Shenfeld , Jyothish Pari , Pulkit Agrawal

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial not only for unlocking their potential in specific tasks but also for ensuring that responses meet human expectations and adhere to safety and ethical principles. Current alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Ruijun Chen , Jiehao Liang , Shiping Gao , Fanqi Wan , Xiaojun Quan

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) has been a go-to and effective method for enhancing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in relatively small LLMs by fine-tuning them with long CoT responses from larger LLMs. To continually improve reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Wang Yang , Hongye Jin , Jingfeng Yang , Vipin Chaudhary , Xiaotian Han

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari