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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) 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

Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiwen Ruan , Yixia Li , He Zhu , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Although LLMs have demonstrated improved performance by scaling parallel test-time compute, doing so relies on generating reasoning paths that are both diverse and accurate. For challenging problems, the forking tokens that trigger diverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sheng Jia , Xiao Wang , Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Tingyu Xia , Bowen Yu , Kai Dang , An Yang , Yuan Wu , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang , Junyang Lin

The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuanfu Wang , Zhixuan Liu , Xiangtian Li , Chaochao Lu , Chao Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

Large language models have achieved significant reasoning improvements through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Yet as model capabilities grow, constructing high-quality reward signals becomes increasingly difficult,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Salman Rahman , Jingyan Shen , Anna Mordvina , Hamid Palangi , Saadia Gabriel , Pavel Izmailov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Qinghua Zhao , Xueling Gong , Xinyu Chen , Zhongfeng Kang , Xinlu Li

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qinyuan Wu , Soumi Das , Mahsa Amani , Bishwamittra Ghosh , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Krishna P. Gummadi , Muhammad Bilal Zafar

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Hardy Chen , Haoqin Tu , Fali Wang , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Xinya Du , Yuyin Zhou , Cihang Xie

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories demonstrations is a common approach for enabling reasoning in large language models. Standard practices typically only retain trajectories with correct final answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xueyun Tian , Minghua Ma , Bingbing Xu , Nuoyan Lyu , Wei Li , Heng Dong , Zheng Chu , Yuanzhuo Wang , Huawei Shen

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated that Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning data distilled from large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) can effectively transfer reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bin Yu , Hang Yuan , Haotian Li , Xueyin Xu , Yuliang Wei , Bailing Wang , Weizhen Qi , Kai Chen

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shengyu Zhang , Linfeng Dong , Xiaoya Li , Sen Zhang , Xiaofei Sun , Shuhe Wang , Jiwei Li , Runyi Hu , Tianwei Zhang , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mark Rofin , Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yiyou Sun , Georgia Zhou , Haoyue Bai , Hao Wang , Dacheng Li , Nouha Dziri , Dawn Song