arXiv AI By Yuelin Hu, Wei Liu, Zhenbo Yu, Zhengxue Cheng, Li Song

GAC: Noise-Aware Adaptive Mixing for Hybrid SFT-RL Post-Training

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The paper introduces GAC, a noise‑aware adaptive mixing controller that dynamically balances supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) gradients during hybrid post‑training of large language models. By deriving a closed‑form mixing weight that minimizes an MSE upper bound on the mixed gradient, GAC incorporates EMA smoothing, a schedule prior, and capped updates, all estimated online from training tensors. Experiments show that GAC outperforms rule‑based controllers, improving performance on diverse benchmarks by up to 3.8 percentage points, reducing KL‑drift by 28%, and cutting large mixing‑weight changes by over 70% with negligible overhead, with gains scaling from 1.5 B to 14 B parameters.

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