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Related papers: A Layer-wise Analysis of Supervised Fine-Tuning

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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

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Yang Nan , Shuo Li , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

Scaling the amount of data used for supervied fine-tuning(SFT) does not guarantee the proportional gains in model performance, highlighting a critical need to understand what makes training samples effective. This work identifies two…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Chengwei Wu , Li Du , Hanyu Zhao , Yiming Ju , Jiapu Wang , Tianyu Chen , Haoyi Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiwen Ruan , Yixia Li , He Zhu , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Fine-tuning, a foundational method for adapting large language models, has long been considered ineffective for model editing. Here, we challenge this belief, arguing that the reported failure arises not from the inherent limitation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wanli Yang , Rui Tang , Hongyu Zang , Du Su , Qi Cao , Jingang Wang , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng , Fei Sun

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

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits broad capabilities, yet, for specific tasks or domains their attainment of higher accuracy and more reliable reasoning generally depends on post-training through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haitao Jiang , Wenbo Zhang , Jiarui Yao , Hengrui Cai , Sheng Wang , Rui Song

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…

Post-training of large language models involves a fundamental trade-off between supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which efficiently mimics demonstrations but tends to memorize, and reinforcement learning (RL), which achieves better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 He Zhu , Junyou Su , Peng Lai , Ren Ma , Wenjia Zhang , Linyi Yang , Guanhua Chen

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a crucial step for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, conflicting objectives across heterogeneous SFT tasks often induce the "seesaw effect": optimizing for one task may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Xiaoyu Liu , Xiaoyu Guan , Di Liang , Xianjie Wu

This paper explores a scientific question in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): why SFT is broadly effective for small-scale deep neural networks, yet can produce inconsistent or even detrimental effects when applied to large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Junpeng Zhang , Lei Cheng , Guoxi Zhang , Hua Cai , Qing Xu , Quanshi Zhang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the standard post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, the conventional SFT process, driven by Cross-Entropy (CE) loss, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yijie Chen , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng

Fine-tuning plays a crucial role in adapting models to downstream tasks with minimal training efforts. However, the rapidly increasing size of foundation models poses a daunting challenge for accommodating foundation model fine-tuning in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Shiwei Ding , Lan Zhang , Zhenlin Wang , Giuseppe Ateniese , Xiaoyong Yuan

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

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

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

Discrete diffusion language models have shown strong potential for text generation, yet standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) misaligns with their semi-autoregressive inference: training randomly masks tokens across the entire response,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bowen Sun , Yujun Cai , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Yiwei Wang

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, offer compact and effective alternatives to full model fine-tuning by introducing low-rank updates to pre-trained weights. However, most existing approaches rely on global low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Babak Barazandeh , Subhabrata Majumdar , Om Rajyaguru , George Michailidis

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become an essential step in tailoring large language models (LLMs) to align with human expectations and specific downstream tasks. However, existing SFT methods typically treat each training instance as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Gyuhak Kim , Sumiran Singh Thakur , Su Min Park , Wei Wei , Yujia Bao