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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

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

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Caiyue Xu , Chenfei Liu , Liting Zhang , Yuhang Jia , Yanzhe Zhang , Hualong Yu , Zichen Xu , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Song Lai , Haohan Zhao , Rong Feng , Changyi Ma , Wenzhuo Liu , Hongbo Zhao , Xi Lin , Dong Yi , Qingfu Zhang , Hongbin Liu , Gaofeng Meng , Fei Zhu

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

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in incentivizing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but suffers from severe efficiency challenges due to its trial-and-error nature. While the common practice employs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Li Shen , Jing Bai , Kam-Fai Wong

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

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

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

Training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning via maths and code datasets has become a major new focus in LLM post-training. Two particularly popular approaches are reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Neel Rajani , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Ivan Titov

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the natural language processing landscape and brought to life diverse applications. Pretraining on vast web-scale data has laid the foundation for these models, yet the research community is now…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) to new domains. In this work, we improve the statistical efficiency of SFT by selecting an informative subset of training examples. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rohan Deb , Kiran Thekumparampil , Kousha Kalantari , Gaurush Hiranandani , Shoham Sabach , Branislav Kveton

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

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

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

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Zhanming Jie , Peng Sun , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li