{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/uft-unifying-supervised-and-reinforcement","title":"UFT: Unifying Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning","arxiv_id":"2505.16984","date":"2025-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mingyang Liu","Gabriele Farina","Asuman Ozdaglar"],"abstract":"Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). SFT is efficient and well-suited for small language models, but it may lead to overfitting and limit the reasoning abilities of larger models. In contrast, RFT generally yields better generalization but depends heavily on the strength of the base model. To address the limitations of SFT and RFT, we propose Unified Fine-Tuning (UFT), a novel post-training paradigm that unifies SFT and RFT into a single, integrated process. UFT enables the model to effectively explore solutions while incorporating informative supervision signals, bridging the gap between memorizing and thinking underlying existing methods. Notably, UFT outperforms both SFT and RFT in general, regardless of model sizes. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that UFT breaks RFT's inherent exponential sample complexity bottleneck, showing for the first time that unified training can exponentially accelerate convergence on long-horizon reasoning tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16984v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16984v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"uft-unifying-supervised-and-reinforcement","repo_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"base","method_name":"BASE"},{"method_slug":"sft","method_name":"SFT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.16984","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.16984"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"ran":2,"ran_honours":1,"ran_fixture":1,"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":4},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":9,"ran":5,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"360c671d6041ba3b","entry":"create_huggingface_actor","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/utils/model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/utils/model.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"360c671d6041ba3b"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"216e28c040173a61","entry":"extract_step","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/trainer/fsdp_sft_trainer.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/trainer/fsdp_sft_trainer.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"216e28c040173a61"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"42a7954a8cfa89e0","entry":"is_transformers_version_in_range","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/models/transformers/monkey_patch.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/models/transformers/monkey_patch.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"42a7954a8cfa89e0"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"21331a58f93375e4","entry":"union_tensor_dict","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/protocol.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/protocol.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"DEP_MISSING","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"21331a58f93375e4"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"25f0ea3f460f6ce1","entry":"unpad_dataproto","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/protocol.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/protocol.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"25f0ea3f460f6ce1"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1fb4adb621eefddc","entry":"apply_monkey_patch","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/models/transformers/monkey_patch.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/models/transformers/monkey_patch.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1fb4adb621eefddc"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"19472d4343d0a082","entry":"get_huggingface_actor_config","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/utils/model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/utils/model.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"19472d4343d0a082"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"919cf310ad4c189a","entry":"get_weight_loader","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/models/weight_loader_registry.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/models/weight_loader_registry.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"919cf310ad4c189a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"3b15e2ac7497c441","entry":"squeeze","repo":"liumy2010/uft","repo_kind":"official","path":"verl/utils/model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/liumy2010/uft/blob/HEAD/verl/utils/model.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"3b15e2ac7497c441"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}