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Preference learning provides a promising solution to address the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for code language models, where the model is not explicitly trained to differentiate between correct and incorrect code. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Dylan Zhang , Shizhe Diao , Xueyan Zou , Hao Peng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in software vulnerability detection, particularly after domain-specific Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely internalize…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Feiyang Huang , Yuqiang Sun , Fan Zhang , Ziqi Yang , Han Liu , Yang Liu

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Shaping powerful LLMs to be beneficial and safe is central to AI alignment. We argue that post-training alignment is fundamentally a unified Preference Learning problem, involving two modalities: demonstrated preferences (e.g., Supervised…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 FaQiang Qian , WeiKun Zhang , Ziliang Wang , Kang An , Xuhui Zheng , Liangjian Wen , Mengya Gao , Yong Dai , Yichao Wu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but their token-level generation encourages local decisions and lacks global planning, often leading to redundant or inaccurate reasoning.…

Iterative preference optimization methods have recently been shown to perform well for general instruction tuning tasks, but typically make little improvement on reasoning tasks (Yuan et al., 2024, Chen et al., 2024). In this work we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Weizhe Yuan , Kyunghyun Cho , He He , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Recent works improving LLM math reasoning with synthetic data have used unique setups, making comparison of data synthesis strategies impractical. This leaves many unanswered questions about the roles of different factors in the synthetic…

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the ''learning cliff''…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xichen Zhang , Sitong Wu , Yinghao Zhu , Haoru Tan , Shaozuo Yu , Ziyi He , Jiaya Jia

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Previous study suggest that powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) only refines reasoning path without improving the reasoning capacity in math tasks while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ran Li , Shimin Di , Yuchen Liu , Chen Jing , Yu Qiu , Lei Chen

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhengbo Jiao , Hongyu Xian , Qinglong Wang , Yunpu Ma , Zhebo Wang , Zifan Zhang , Dezhang Kong , Meng Han

Recent advances in test-time scaling suggest that Large Language Models (LLMs) can gain better capabilities by generating Chain-of-Thought reasoning (analogous to human thinking) to respond a given request, and meanwhile exploring more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuhang Wang , Youhe Jiang , Bin Cui , Fangcheng Fu

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standard reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Ian Wu , Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Aviral Kumar

Recent studies have shown that supervised fine-tuning of LLMs on a small number of high-quality datasets can yield strong reasoning capabilities. However, full fine-tuning (Full FT), while powerful, is computationally expensive and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zihang Liu , Tianyu Pang , Oleg Balabanov , Chaoqun Yang , Tianjin Huang , Lu Yin , Yaoqing Yang , Shiwei Liu

When encountering increasingly frequent performance improvements or cost reductions from a new large language model (LLM), developers of applications leveraging LLMs must decide whether to take advantage of these improvements or stay with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Rubing Li , João Sedoc , Arun Sundararajan

Since the introduction of the GRPO algorithm, reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted increasing attention for LLM post-training, yet training efficiency remains a critical challenge. In mainstream RL frameworks, inference and training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jian Lu

Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Pratham Singla , Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Ishan Garg , Ketan Suhaas Saichandran

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Zui Chen , Tianqiao Liu , Mi Tian , Qing Tong , Weiqi Luo , Zitao Liu