Related papers: SFT-GRPO Data Overlap as a Post-Training Hyperpara…
This paper provides a self-contained, from-scratch, exposition of key algorithms for instruction tuning of models: SFT, Rejection Sampling, REINFORCE, Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Group…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) has been a go-to and effective method for enhancing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in relatively small LLMs by fine-tuning them with long CoT responses from larger LLMs. To continually improve reasoning…
Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…
Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…
The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely used after supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align language models, yet empirical behavior under small backbones and modest data is under-specified. We systematically compare SFT-only, DPO-only,…
Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown impressive generalization capability in downstream vision tasks with appropriate text prompts. Instead of designing prompts manually, Context Optimization (CoOp) has been…
Recent progress in flow-based generative models and reinforcement learning (RL) has improved text-image alignment and visual quality. However, current RL training for flow models still has two main problems: (i) GRPO-style fixed per-prompt…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) enhances policy learning by computing gradients from relative comparisons among candidate outputs that share a common input prefix. Despite its effectiveness, GRPO introduces substantial…
Mathematical reasoning remains a challenging area for large language models (LLMs), prompting the development of math-specific LLMs such as LLEMMA, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math, among others. These models typically follow a two-stage…
As Test-Time Scaling emerges as an active research focus in the large language model community, advanced post-training methods increasingly emphasize extending chain-of-thought (CoT) generation length, thereby enhancing reasoning…
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…
Post-training of reasoning LLMs is a holistic process that typically consists of an offline SFT stage followed by an online reinforcement learning (RL) stage. However, SFT is often optimized in isolation to maximize SFT performance alone.…
A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…
Multimodal reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) typically relies on a two-stage process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In standard SFT, all tokens contribute equally to the loss, even though reasoning…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…
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…
Group-relative policy optimization methods train language models by generating multiple rollouts per prompt and normalizing rewards with a shared mean reward baseline. In resource-constrained settings where the rollout budget is small,…