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Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Dinesh Khandelwal , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through post-training reveals a pronounced generalization gap: models fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning (RL) consistently achieve superior out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Aojun Lu , Tao Feng , Hangjie Yuan , Wei Li , Yanan Sun

Reasoning models leveraging long chains of thought employ various cognitive skills, such as verification of their answers, backtracking, retrying by an alternate method, and more. Previous work has shown that when a base language model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zayne Sprague , Jack Lu , Manya Wadhwa , Sedrick Keh , Mengye Ren , Greg Durrett

Synthetically-generated data plays an increasingly larger role in training large language models. However, while synthetic data has been found to be useful, studies have also shown that without proper curation it can cause LLM performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Kareem Amin , Sara Babakniya , Alex Bie , Weiwei Kong , Umar Syed , Sergei Vassilvitskii

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Duygu Nur Yaldiz , Evangelia Spiliopoulou , Zheng Qi , Siddharth Varia , Srikanth Doss , Nikolaos Pappas

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has enhanced the reasoning of large-scale language models (LLMs), its efficacy for lightweight multimodal language models (MLLMs) with fewer than seven billion parameters remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Linyu Ou , YuYang Yin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Yunhai Feng , Nicklas Hansen , Ziyan Xiong , Chandramouli Rajagopalan , Xiaolong Wang

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

Unsupervised visual representation learning offers the opportunity to leverage large corpora of unlabeled trajectories to form useful visual representations, which can benefit the training of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Wancong Zhang , Anthony GX-Chen , Vlad Sobal , Yann LeCun , Nicolas Carion

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

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is used as a replacement for expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Yunzhen Feng , Elvis Dohmatob , Pu Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Most existing policy learning solutions require the learning agents to receive high-quality supervision signals such as well-designed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL) or high-quality expert demonstrations in behavioral cloning (BC).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Jingkang Wang , Hongyi Guo , Zhaowei Zhu , Yang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for learning to take actions to solve tasks. However, in many settings, an agent must winnow down the inconceivably large space of all possible tasks to the single task that it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Shixiang Shane Gu , Chelsea Finn

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mrinal Rawat , Arkajyoti Chakraborty , Neha Gupta , Roberto Pieraccini

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

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 Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Bingwen Wei , Xinlei Chen , Qingmin Liao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiaxiang Li , Siliang Zeng , Hoi-To Wai , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong