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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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in multilingual language understanding and generation. However, due to the imbalance in training data, their capabilities in non-English languages are limited. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Wenshuai Huo , Xiaocheng Feng , Yichong Huang , Chengpeng Fu , Baohang Li , Yangfan Ye , Zhirui Zhang , Dandan Tu , Duyu Tang , Yunfei Lu , Hui Wang , Bing Qin

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Davood Rafiei , Morgan Lindsay Heisler , Weiwei Zhang , Mohammadreza Pourreza , Yong Zhang

Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yaowen Ye , Cassidy Laidlaw , Jacob Steinhardt

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to train language models to imitate annotated responses for given instructions. In this paper, we propose Critique Fine-Tuning (CFT), a method more effective than SFT for reasoning tasks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yubo Wang , Xiang Yue , Wenhu Chen

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 (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yuqian Fu , Tinghong Chen , Jiajun Chai , Xihuai Wang , Songjun Tu , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Language models often show little to no improvement (i.e., "saturation") when trained via vanilla supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on data similar to what they saw in their training set (e.g., MATH). We introduce a new fine-tuning strategy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yinghui He , Abhishek Panigrahi , Yong Lin , Sanjeev Arora

Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized, privacy-preserving model training but struggles to balance global generalization and local personalization due to non-identical data distributions across clients. Personalized Fine-Tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Minghui Chen , Hrad Ghoukasian , Ruinan Jin , Zehua Wang , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Xiaoxiao Li

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

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Siyuan Lu , Zechuan Wang , Hongxuan Zhang , Qintong Wu , Leilei Gan , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu , Tao Lin

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in handling natural language tasks; however, they may struggle to consistently follow complex instructions including those involve multiple constraints. Post-training LLMs using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuheng Lu , ZiMeng Bai , Caixia Yuan , Huixing Jiang , Xiaojie Wang

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chengpeng Li , Guanting Dong , Keming Lu , Chuanqi Tan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong mathematical problem-solving abilities but frequently fail on problems that deviate syntactically from their training distribution. We identify a systematic failure mode, syntactic blind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Dane Williamson , Yangfeng Ji , Matthew Dwyer

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Lai Wei , Yuting Li , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Linghe Kong , Weiran Huang , Lichao Sun

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought significant improvements to various service domains, including chatbots and medical pre-consultation applications. In the healthcare domain, the most common approach for adapting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Seungseop Lim , Gibaeg Kim , Wooseok Han , Jean Seo , Hyunkyung Lee , Jaehyo Yoo , Eunho Yang

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

LLMs' performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Yang Zhao , Li Du , Xiao Ding , Kai Xiong , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

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

Widely used language models (LMs) are typically built by scaling up a two-stage training pipeline: a pre-training stage that uses a very large, diverse dataset of text and a fine-tuning (sometimes, 'alignment') stage that uses targeted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Eric Mitchell , Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn , Christopher D. Manning