Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting pretrained language models to downstream domains, yet it often improves target-domain behavior at the cost of degrading pre-existing capabilities. Standard cross-entropy fine-tuning promotes only the observed label token and leaves unconstrained how probability mass is redistributed over other plausible alternatives, potentially distorting the rich local preference structure learned during pretraining.
arXiv:2606. 09396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL.
By Ke Wang, Shuangqi Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Pascal Frossard
arXiv:2606. 11189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) typically maximizes the likelihood of every token in a demonstrated trajectory.
By Tong Xie, Yuanhao Ban, Yunqi Hong, Sohyun An, Yihang Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh
arXiv:2604. 03532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show strong multilingual capabilities, yet reliably controlling the language of their outputs remains difficult.
By Sing Hieng Wong, Hassan Sajjad, A. B. Siddique
arXiv:2607. 08839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference.
By Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Srijan Das, Yuki Mistufuji
arXiv:2603. 07523v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transferring knowledge by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained networks has become a standard paradigm for downstream tasks, yet the knowledge of a pre-trained model is tightly coupled with monolithic architecture, which restricts flexible reuse across models of varying scales.
By Jianlu Shen, Fu Feng, Yucheng Xie, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng
arXiv:2510. 16882v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks.
By Heming Zou, Yixiu Mao, Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Xiangyang Ji
arXiv:2606. 05173v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked language modelling (MLM) has been the dominant pre-training objective for text encoders since BERT, yet it encourages representations that are strongly anchored to surface-form token identity rather than deeper semantic structure.
By Aimen Boukhari
arXiv:2608. 11342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a standard approach for adapting LLMs to a target distribution, but in settings such as personalization, where each author requires separate weight access, optimization, storage, and retraining, its costs become prohibitive.
By Bohan Zhang, Anqi Ni, Yixin Wang, Paramveer S. Dhillon
arXiv:2601. 22947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text by unmasking tokens in parallel and have recently emerged as alternatives to autoregressive language models.
By Mengyu Ye, Keito Kudo, Ryosuke Takahashi, Jun Suzuki
arXiv:2608. 05000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining.
By Junlin Han, Shengbang Tong, David Fan, Minghao Chen, Philip Torr, Filippos Kokkinos, Mike Lewis
arXiv:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.
By Jimmy T. H. Smith, Tarek Dakhran, Alberto Cabrera, Simon S. Lee, Paul Pak, Aditya Tadimeti, Tim Seyde, Maxime Labonne, Alexander Amini, Mathias Lechner