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Related papers: From SFT to RL: Demystifying the Post-Training Pip…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) for LLM post-training faces a fundamental design choice: whether to use a learned critic as a baseline for policy optimization. Classical theory favors critic-based methods such as PPO for variance reduction, yet…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language model reasoning by using rule-based rewards in verifiable domains such as mathematics and code. However, RLVR leads to limited generalization for open-ended tasks --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Adithya Bhaskar , Xi Ye , Danqi Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tianzhe Chu , Yuexiang Zhai , Jihan Yang , Shengbang Tong , Saining Xie , Dale Schuurmans , Quoc V. Le , Sergey Levine , Yi Ma

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven its effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external resources. To adapt LLMs for the RAG systems, current approaches use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Xinze Li , Sen Mei , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Shi Yu , Zheni Zeng , Hao Chen , Ge Yu , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun , Chenyan Xiong

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) post-training have leveraged two distinct paradigms to enhance reasoning capabilities: reinforcement learning (RL) and knowledge distillation (KD). While RL enables the emergence of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hongling Xu , Qi Zhu , Heyuan Deng , Jinpeng Li , Lu Hou , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Ruifeng Xu , Fei Mi

Recent advancements adopt online reinforcement learning (RL) from LLMs to text-to-image rectified flow diffusion models for reward alignment. The use of group-level rewards successfully aligns the model with the targeted reward. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yiyang Wang , Xi Chen , Xiaogang Xu , Yu Liu , Hengshuang Zhao

Despite substantial advances in scaling test-time compute, an ongoing debate in the community is how it should be scaled up to enable continued and efficient improvements with scaling. There are largely two approaches: first, distilling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amrith Setlur , Nived Rajaraman , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising advancements in sequential decision-making tasks through task-specific fine-tuning. However, common fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Haoqiang Kang , Enna Sachdeva , Piyush Gupta , Sangjae Bae , Kwonjoon Lee

Data selection methods address a critical challenge in LLM post-training: effectively leveraging scarce, high-fidelity target data alongside abundant but imperfectly aligned general training data. In this work, we move beyond the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Pingbang Hu , Xueshen Liu , Z. Morley Mao , Jiaqi W. Ma

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

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

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising route to parallel and efficient text generation, but improving their reasoning ability requires effective post-training. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zichao Yu , Shengze Xu , Bingqing Jiang , Wenyi Zhang , Difan Zou

Prevalent reinforcement learning~(RL) methods for fine-tuning LLM reasoners, such as GRPO or Leave-one-out PPO, abandon the learned value function in favor of empirically estimated returns. This hinders test-time compute scaling that relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Kusha Sareen , Morgane M Moss , Alessandro Sordoni , Rishabh Agarwal , Arian Hosseini

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have spurred significant progress in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Building on the success of Deepseek-R1, researchers extended multimodal reasoning to post-training paradigms…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jianyu Qi , Ding Zou , Wenrui Yan , Rui Ma , Jiaxu Li , Zhijie Zheng , Zhiguo Yang , Rongchang Zhao

While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise to become autonomous agents, they often explore suboptimally in sequential decision-making. Recent work has sought to enhance this capability via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sanxing Chen , Xiaoyin Chen , Yukun Huang , Roy Xie , Bhuwan Dhingra

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…