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Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are increasingly taking the form of sophisticated modular pipelines, e.g., Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), where each module may involve a distinct Language Model (LM) and an associated prompt…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, leading to their adoption in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific research. However, their reasoning often contains subtle logical…

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation in multiple aspects. However, many medical VLMs rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which optimizes next-token prediction without…

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…

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a key technique for training large reasoning models, yet it suffers from a critical vulnerability: the \emph{Think-Answer Mismatch}, where noisy reward signals corrupt the learning process. This…

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Recent supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have significantly improved language models' performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, even when models are trained at a small scale. However, the specific capabilities enhanced through such…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Recently, small models with latent recursion have obtained promising results on complex reasoning tasks. These results are typically explained by the theory that such recursion increases a networks depth, allowing it to compactly emulate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have recently achieved impressive results on reasoning benchmarks. Yet, growing evidence shows that these models often generate longer but ineffective chains of thought…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in clinical decision support, yet aligning them with the multifaceted reasoning pathways of real-world medicine remains a major challenge. Using more than 8,000 infertility treatment…

While critical for alignment, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) incurs the risk of catastrophic forgetting, yet the layer-wise emergence of instruction-following capabilities remains elusive. We investigate this mechanism via a comprehensive…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. Bridging this gap typically requires large-scale multimodal reasoning data or reinforcement learning,…

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…

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is essential for the development of medical large language models (LLMs), yet prior poisoning studies have mainly focused on the detectable backdoor attacks. We propose a novel poisoning attack targeting the…

Multi-agent LLM workflows route inference through specialized roles to lift end-task accuracy, but jointly training those roles with reinforcement learning is unstable in ways that are poorly understood. We study when end-to-end RL training…