Finetuning with Sampling: SFT Learns Better Than You Think

Introducing new capabilities to frontier models has long been the goal of posttraining, which predominantly employs supervised finetuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to this end. Conventional wisdom dictates that RL enables strong generalization on new tasks without losing existing capabilities, while SFT is prone to weak generalization and catastrophic forgetting. At the same time, SFT can learn from off-policy expert data, whereas RL must rely on a model's ability to find successful trajectories with repeated sampling. In our work, we seek to leverage the strength of on-policy learning while utilizing the privileged information contained in off-policy data. However, rather tha...

<iframe src="https://silytics.si/embed/item/2c4c1026-17f2-4477-8842-20d0cedf4edd" width="420" height="190" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Silytics entry"></iframe>

Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 19 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.