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Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) dominate the post-training landscape for mathematical reasoning, yet differ fundamentally in their reliance on expert trajectories. To understand the optimal way to harness these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bowen Ding , Yuhan Chen , Jiayang Lyv , Jiyao Yuan , Qi Zhu , Shuangshuang Tian , Dantong Zhu , Futing Wang , Heyuan Deng , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Tao Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Wang Yang , Hongye Jin , Jingfeng Yang , Vipin Chaudhary , Xiaotian Han

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-following corpus is a crucial approach toward the alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, the performance of LLMs on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks tends to suffer from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Tingchen Fu , Deng Cai , Lemao Liu , Shuming Shi , Rui Yan

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Roy Xie , David Qiu , Deepak Gopinath , Dong Lin , Yanchao Sun , Chong Wang , Saloni Potdar , Bhuwan Dhingra

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hongyi James Cai , Junlin Wang , Xiaoyin Chen , Bhuwan Dhingra

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yiming Ju , Ziyi Ni , Xingrun Xing , Zhixiong Zeng , hanyu Zhao , Siqi Fan , Zheng Zhang

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

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ruiying Peng , Mengyu Yang , Jing Lei , Xiaohui Li , Xueyu Wu , Xinlei Chen

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

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

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ziyan Wang , Zheng Wang , Xingwei Qu , Qi Cheng , Jie Fu , Shengpu Tang , Minjia Zhang , Xiaoming Huo

Prior research shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic extrapolation bias when forming predictions from both experimental and real-world data, and that prompt-based approaches appear limited in alleviating this bias. We…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-05 Zhenyu Gao , Wenxi Jiang , Yutong Yan

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The LLMs generally undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to be usable in downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Kiran Ramnath , Xiang-Bo Mao , Regunathan Radhakrishnan , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng