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While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities utilizing reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable reward, whether large vision-language models (VLMs) can directly inherit such capabilities through similar…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tianle Li , Jihai Zhang , Yongming Rao , Yu Cheng

The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through post-training reveals a pronounced generalization gap: models fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning (RL) consistently achieve superior out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Aojun Lu , Tao Feng , Hangjie Yuan , Wei Li , Yanan Sun

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Bingwen Wei , Xinlei Chen , Qingmin Liao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

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

Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to generate personalized image captions, even when trained on high-quality captions. In this work, we observe that such limitations persist in existing post-training-based MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Yeongtak Oh , Dohyun Chung , Juhyeon Shin , Sangha Park , Johan Barthelemy , Jisoo Mok , Sungroh Yoon

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning, alignment, and task-specific performance. However, ensuring harmlessness in these systems remains a critical challenge, particularly in advanced models like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Manojkumar Parmar , Yuvaraj Govindarajulu

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mrinal Rawat , Arkajyoti Chakraborty , Neha Gupta , Roberto Pieraccini

This paper presents a study on strategies to enhance the translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of machine translation (MT) tasks. The paper proposes a novel paradigm consisting of three stages: Secondary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Jiaxin Guo , Hao Yang , Zongyao Li , Daimeng Wei , Hengchao Shang , Xiaoyu Chen

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Pratham Singla , Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Ishan Garg , Ketan Suhaas Saichandran

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xin Qiu , Yulu Gan , Conor F. Hayes , Qiyao Liang , Yinggan Xu , Roberto Dailey , Elliot Meyerson , Babak Hodjat , Risto Miikkulainen

Recent advancements in Chain of Thought (COT) generation have significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as an effective post-training approach. Multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yi Chen , Yuying Ge , Rui Wang , Yixiao Ge , Lu Qiu , Ying Shan , Xihui Liu

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

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 become essential for adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex downstream behaviors, including instruction following, preference alignment, and multi-step reasoning. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Chengqian Zhang , Wei Zhu , Kyumin Lee

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 2025-02-21 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Dinesh Khandelwal , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi