Related papers: Iterative Finetuning is Mostly Idempotent

Aligning large-scale text-to-image diffusion models with nuanced human preferences remains challenging. While direct preference optimization (DPO) is simple and effective, large-scale finetuning often shows a generalization gap. We take…

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Diffusion models are a class of flexible generative models trained with an approximation to the log-likelihood objective. However, most use cases of diffusion models are not concerned with likelihoods, but instead with downstream objectives…

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a de-facto approach for aligning language models with human preferences. Recent work has shown DPO's effectiveness relies on training data quality. In particular, clear quality differences…

Post-training alignment of diffusion models relies on simplified signals, such as scalar rewards or binary preferences. This limits alignment with complex human expertise, which is hierarchical and fine-grained. To address this, we first…

Large Language Model (LLM) fine tuning is underutilized in the field of medicine. Two of the most common methods of fine tuning are Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), but there is little guidance…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard paradigm for domain adaptation, yet it frequently incurs the cost of catastrophic forgetting. In sharp contrast, on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) effectively preserves general capabilities.…

We present a controlled study of how dataset contamination interacts with the post-training stages now standard in large language model training pipelines. Starting from clean checkpoints of Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B) and Gemma3 (1B/4B), we inject…

Direct preference optimization (DPO) has shown success in aligning diffusion models with human preference. Previous approaches typically assume a consistent preference label between final generations and noisy samples at intermediate steps,…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as a crucial method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human-annotated demonstrations. However, SFT, being an off-policy approach similar to behavior cloning, often struggles with…

DPO is an effective preference optimization algorithm. However, the DPO-tuned models tend to overfit on the dispreferred samples, manifested as overly long generations lacking diversity. While recent regularization approaches have…

Data augmentation has become a de facto component for training high-performance deep image classifiers, but its potential is under-explored for object detection. Noting that most state-of-the-art object detectors benefit from fine-tuning a…

Variational methods that rely on a recognition network to approximate the posterior of directed graphical models offer better inference and learning than previous methods. Recent advances that exploit the capacity and flexibility in this…

Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when…

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,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in automating software development tasks. While recent advances leverage Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align models with human…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity:…

Foundation models pretrained on large-scale natural images are widely adapted to various cross-domain low-resource downstream tasks, benefiting from generalizable and transferable patterns captured by their representations. However, these…