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An LLM's factuality and refusal training can be compromised by simple changes to a prompt. Models often adopt user beliefs (sycophancy) or satisfy inappropriate requests which are wrapped within special text (jailbreaking). We explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Alex Irpan , Alexander Matt Turner , Mark Kurzeja , David K. Elson , Rohin Shah

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guanglong Sun , Siyuan Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Jun Zhu , Hang Su , Yi Zhong

Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Guoli Wang , Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

As LLMs gain stronger reasoning capabilities, their extended chain-of-thought introduces new degrees of complexity for defending against adversarial jailbreaks and prompt injection. We study consistency training, a family of fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Avidan Shah , Jannik Brinkmann , Rico Angell

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Muxi Diao , Lele Yang , Wuxuan Gong , Yutong Zhang , Zhonghao Yan , Yufei Han , Kongming Liang , Weiran Xu , Zhanyu Ma

Safety alignment often improves robustness to harmful queries at the cost of reasoning ability, a tradeoff known as the safety tax. A common cause is distributional mismatch: supervised fine-tuning trains the target model on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yu Fu , Longxuan Yu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Zhipeng Wei , Hui Liu , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

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

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from a fixed dataset while maximizing performance under cumulative cost constraints. In practice, deployment requirements often vary across scenarios, necessitating a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Wensong Bai , Chao Zhang , Qihang Xu , Chufan Chen , Chenhao Zhou , Hui Qian

Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become increasingly central to scaling LLM post-training, delivering major throughput gains by decoupling rollout generation from policy updates. However, widely used policy-gradient objectives such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luke J. Huang , Zhuoyang Zhang , Qinghao Hu , Shang Yang , Song Han

Robust training methods typically defend against specific attack types, such as Lp attacks with fixed budgets, and rarely account for the fact that defenders may encounter new attacks over time. A natural solution is to adapt the defended…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Sihui Dai , Christian Cianfarani , Arjun Bhagoji , Vikash Sehwag , Prateek Mittal

This research investigates the effectiveness of alignment techniques, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and a combined SFT+DPO approach on improving the safety and helpfulness of the OPT-350M language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Piyush Pant

Foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs), are powerful but often require customization before deployment to satisfy practical constraints such as safety, privacy, and task-specific requirements, leading to "constrained"…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shuo Yang , Qihui Zhang , Yuyang Liu , Xiaojun Jia , Kunpeng Ning , Jiayu Yao , Jigang Wang , Hailiang Dai , Yibing Song , Li Yuan

Despite the strong performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex instruction-following tasks, precise control of output length remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods primarily attempt to enforce length constraints by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Wei Zhang , Lintong Du , Yuanhe Zhang , Zhenhong Zhou , Kun Wang , Li Sun , Sen Su

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

Specification gaming under Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to cause LLMs to develop sycophantic, manipulative, or deceptive behavior, yet the conditions under which this occurs remain unclear. We train 11 instruction-tuned LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens
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