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Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Zhang , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) yields substantial improvements in large language models (LLMs) downstream task performance and alignment with human values. Surprisingly, such large gains result from updating only a small subnetwork comprising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Hao Peng

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi Hu , Shijia Kang , Haotong Yang , Haotian Xu , Muhan Zhang

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) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang

Building speech deepfake detection models that are generalizable to unseen attacks remains a challenging problem. Although the field has shifted toward a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm using speech foundation models, most approaches…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-04 Xin Wang , Ge Wanying , Junichi Yamagishi

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Chao Xue , Yao Wang , Mengqiao Liu , Di Liang , Xingsheng Han , Peiyang Liu , Xianjie Wu , Chenyao Lu , Lei Jiang , Yu Lu , Haibo Shi , Shuang Liang , Minlong Peng , Flora D. Salim

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jackson Harmon , Andreas Hochlehnert , Matthias Bethge , Ameya Prabhu

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han

We introduce a method to address goal misgeneralization in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) feedback during training. Goal misgeneralization, a type of robustness failure in RL occurs when an agent retains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Houda Nait El Barj , Theophile Sautory

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jinghan Jia , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

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) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a critical step for enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and adapting them to specialized domains. However, SFT often leads to a degradation of the model's general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

Comparison of fine-tuning models with reinforcement learning (RL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) reveals that, despite similar performance at a new task, RL preserves prior knowledge and capabilities significantly better. We find that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Idan Shenfeld , Jyothish Pari , Pulkit Agrawal