English
Related papers

Related papers: Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Syste…

200 papers

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Gaotang Li , Ruizhong Qiu , Xiusi Chen , Heng Ji , Hanghang Tong

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Tingyu Xia , Bowen Yu , Kai Dang , An Yang , Yuan Wu , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang , Junyang Lin

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

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Qianxi Li , Yingyue Cao , Jikun Kang , Tianpei Yang , Xi Chen , Jun Jin , Matthew E. Taylor

A common challenge towards the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn new languages over time without hampering the model's performance on languages in which the model is already proficient (usually English).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Divyanshu Aggarwal , Sankarshan Damle , Navin Goyal , Satya Lokam , Sunayana Sitaram

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a pivotal approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks; however, performance often suffers from the ``seesaw phenomenon'', where indiscriminate parameter updates yield progress on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yao Wang , Di Liang , Minlong Peng

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with user intent, yet it is believed to suppress generative diversity. Although this reduction is frequently referenced, formal empirical testing of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Roman Klypa , Oleksandr Cherednichenko

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Instruction Fine-Tuning enhances pre-trained language models from basic next-word prediction to complex instruction-following. However, existing One-off Instruction Fine-Tuning (One-off IFT) method, applied on a diverse instruction, may not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Wei Pang , Chuan Zhou , Xiao-Hua Zhou , Xiaojie Wang

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT), supervised instruction tuning (SIT) and in-context learning (ICL) are three alternative, de facto standard approaches to few-shot learning. ICL has gained popularity recently with the advent of LLMs due to its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Evgeniia Razumovskaia , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

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