arXiv AI

When RL Fails after SFT: Rejuvenating Model Plasticity for Robust SFT-to-RL Handoff

arXiv:2606. 09932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a standard pipeline for Large Language Model (LLM) post-training.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting.

By Chenrui Wu, Zexi Li, Jiajun Bu, Jiangchuan Liu, Haishuai Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Probing the Origins of Reasoning Performance: Representational Quality for Mathematical Problem-Solving in RL vs. SFT Fine-Tuned Models

arXiv:2607. 26119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models trained via reinforcement learning (RL) have been increasingly shown to outperform their supervised fine-tuned (SFT) counterparts on mathematical reasoning tasks; Yet the mechanistic basis for this advantage remains unclear.

By Antyabha Rahman, Akshaj Gurugubelli, Omar Ankit, Kevin Zhu, Aishwarya Balwani
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond SFT-to-RL: Pre-alignment via Black-Box On-Policy Distillation for Multimodal RL

arXiv:2604. 28123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).

By Sudong Wang, Weiquan Huang, Xiaomin Yu, Zuhao Yang, Hehai Lin, Keming Wu, Chaojun Xiao, Chen Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Beier Zhu, Yunjian Zhang, Chengwei Qin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns.