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Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning have shown that sophisticated behaviors such as planning and self-reflection can emerge through reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite these successes, RL in its current form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Lu Ma , Hao Liang , Meiyi Qiang , Lexiang Tang , Xiaochen Ma , Zhen Hao Wong , Junbo Niu , Chengyu Shen , Runming He , Yanhao Li , Bin Cui , Wentao Zhang

While reinforcement learning (RL) successfully enhances reasoning in large language models, its role in fostering compositional generalization (the ability to synthesize novel skills from known components) is often conflated with mere…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Park , Simran Kaur , Sanjeev Arora

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training has markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms by which CoT training enhances generalization remain inadequately understood. In this work, we demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Xinhao Yao , Ruifeng Ren , Yun Liao , Lizhong Ding , Yong Liu

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

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well in single-image visual grounding but struggle with real-world tasks that demand cross-image reasoning and multi-modal instructions. To address this, we adopt a reinforcement learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Bob Zhang , Haoran Li , Tao Zhang , Jianan Li , Cilin Yan , Xikai Liu , Jiayin Cai , Yanbin Hao

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

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), sparking increased interest in the generalization of RL-based reasoning. While existing work has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Wen Yang , Junhong Wu , Chong Li , Chengqing Zong , Jiajun Zhang

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

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool utilization. However, the generalization of tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) across diverse domains remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhengyu Chen , Jinluan Yang , Teng Xiao , Ruochen Zhou , Luan Zhang , Xiangyu Xi , Xiaowei Shi , Wei Wang , Jinggang Wang

Directly training Large Language Models (LLMs) for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) remains challenging due to intricate reward modeling, dynamic agent interactions, and demanding generalization requirements. This paper explores whether…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yufa Zhou , Shaobo Wang , Xingyu Dong , Xiangqi Jin , Yifang Chen , Yue Min , Kexin Yang , Xingzhang Ren , Dayiheng Liu , Linfeng Zhang

Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuxing Liu , Jianyu Wang , Tong Zhang

A common approach for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason is to train on chain-of-thought (CoT) traces of in-distribution reasoning problems, but such annotated data is costly to obtain for every problem of interest. We want…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Fangcong Yin , Zeyu Leo Liu , Liu Leqi , Xi Ye , Greg Durrett

We study how different Chain-of-Thought (CoT) designs affect the acquisition of the generalizable visual reasoning ability in vision-language models (VLMs). While CoT data, especially long or visual CoT such as "think with image", has been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yifan Du , Kun Zhou , Yingqian Min , Yue Ling , Wayne Xin Zhao , Youbin Wu

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameters emerge diverse abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Guanting Dong , Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Chengpeng Li , Mingfeng Xue , Dayiheng Liu , Wei Wang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of foundation models often leads to poor generalization, where prior capabilities deteriorate after tuning on new tasks or domains. Inspired by trust-region policy optimization (TRPO) and proximal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Xingwu Sun , Di Wang , Pengfei Liu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate great potential for problems with implicit graphical structures, while recent works seek to enhance the graph reasoning capabilities of LLMs through specialized instruction tuning. The resulting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Yizhuo Zhang , Heng Wang , Shangbin Feng , Zhaoxuan Tan , Xiaochuang Han , Tianxing He , Yulia Tsvetkov

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang