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Automated prompt optimization methods (e.g., DSpy, TextGrad) can substantially improve the performance of large language model (LLM), however, their generalization ability across different tasks remains underperformed. In practice, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Shuzhi Gong , Hechuan Wen

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well in single-image visual grounding but struggle with real-world tasks that demand cross-image reasoning and multi-modal instructions. To address this, we adopt a reinforcement learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Bob Zhang , Haoran Li , Tao Zhang , Jianan Li , Cilin Yan , Xikai Liu , Jiayin Cai , Yanbin Hao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Recent LLMs have demonstrated sophisticated problem-solving capabilities on various benchmarks through advanced reasoning algorithms. However, the key research question of identifying reasoning steps that balance complexity and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Po-Chung Hsieh , Chin-Po Chen , Jeng-Lin Li , Ming-Ching Chang

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yishu Wei , Yi Lin , Adam Flanders , George Shih , Yifan Peng

We introduce OpenVLThinker, one of the first open-source large vision-language models (LVLMs) to exhibit sophisticated chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving notable performance gains on challenging visual reasoning tasks. While text-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Yihe Deng , Hritik Bansal , Fan Yin , Nanyun Peng , Wei Wang , Kai-Wei Chang

Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Maxime Heuillet , Yufei Cui , Boxing Chen , Audrey Durand , Prasanna Parthasarathi

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

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Qingyang Zhang , Haitao Wu , Changqing Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Yatao Bian

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is increasingly impractical, making post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning (RL-FT, e.g., PPO) central to modern practice. Using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Hangzhan Jin , Sicheng Lv , Sifan Wu , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jonathan Williams , Esin Tureci

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Zhanming Jie , Peng Sun , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on complex mathematical benchmarks yet sometimes fail on basic math reasoning while generating unnecessarily verbose responses. In this paper, we present LLMThinkBench, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Gaurav Srivastava , Aafiya Hussain , Sriram Srinivasan , Xuan Wang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

We revisit policy-gradient optimization for Large Language Models (LLMs) from a single-stream perspective. Prevailing group-based methods like GRPO reduce variance with on-the-fly baselines but suffer from critical flaws: frequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Zhongwen Xu , Zihan Ding

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Saraswathy Amjith , Mihika Dusad , Neha Muramalla , Shweta Shah

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Off-policy problems such as policy staleness and training--inference mismatch have become a major bottleneck for training stability and further exploration in LLM RL. The distribution gap between the inference and updated policies grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Xuanchang Zhang , Yifan Hao , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Abhinav Gullapalli , Hao Chen , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang

Current LLM post-training methods optimize complete reasoning trajectories through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). While effective, a closer examination reveals a fundamental gap: this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shaojie Wang , Liang Zhang

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. While closed LLMs like GPT-4 perform well on mathematical benchmarks, e.g., GSM8K, it remains unclear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Yanan Chen , Ali Pesaranghader , Tanmana Sadhu