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Process Reinforcement Learning~(PRL) has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, introducing additional process reward models incurs substantial computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Wu Fei , Hao Kong , Shuxian Liang , Yang Lin , Yibo Yang , Jing Tang , Lei Chen , Xiansheng Hua

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional RL approaches, RLVR leverages rule-based feedback to guide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Jia Deng , Jie Chen , Zhipeng Chen , Daixuan Cheng , Fei Bai , Beichen Zhang , Yinqian Min , Yanzipeng Gao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex reasoning tasks that require executing several complex steps before receiving any reward. Properly assigning credit to these steps is essential for enhancing model…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is increasingly impractical, making post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning (RL-FT, e.g., PPO) central to modern practice. Using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hangzhan Jin , Sicheng Lv , Sifan Wu , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, and common post-training pipelines often reduce each generated solution to a binary outcome: correct or incorrect. This perspective is limiting in practice, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haocheng Lu , Minjun Zhu , Henry Yu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Recently, reinforcement learning~(RL) has become an important approach for improving the capabilities of large language models~(LLMs). In particular, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards~(RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fei Bai , Zhipeng Chen , Chuan Hao , Ming Yang , Ran Tao , Bryan Dai , Wayne Xin Zhao , Jian Yang , Hongteng Xu

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Lai Wei , Yuting Li , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Linghe Kong , Weiran Huang , Lichao Sun

As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems. Therefore, studying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Mehar Bhatia , Shravan Nayak , Gaurav Kamath , Marius Mosbach , Karolina Stańczak , Vered Shwartz , Siva Reddy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known for its strong decision-making capabilities and has been widely applied in various real-world scenarios. However, with the increasing availability of offline datasets and the lack of well-designed online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

Understanding real-world videos with complex semantics and long temporal dependencies remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has demonstrated strong capabilities in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Hongyu Li , Songhao Han , Yue Liao , Junfeng Luo , Jialin Gao , Shuicheng Yan , Si Liu

Reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, but the conditions under which it transfers across domains -- and why it does so -- remain under-explored. We study cross-domain transfer in a 7B model whose SFT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Mayug Maniparambil , Arjun Karuvally , Terrence Sejnowski , Fergal Reid

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Cheng Qian , Emre Can Acikgoz , Qi He , Hongru Wang , Xiusi Chen , Dilek Hakkani-Tür , Gokhan Tur , Heng Ji

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee