Reassessing the Role of Supervised Fine-Tuning: An Empirical Study in VLM Reasoning

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies suggest that introducing the SFT stage not only fails to improve reasoning ability but may also negatively impact model training. In this study, we revisit this RL-centric belief through a systematic and controlled comparison of SFT and RL on VLM Reasoning. Using identical data sources, we find that the relative effectiveness of SFT and RL is conditional and strongly influenced by model capacity, data scale, and data distribution. Contrary to common assumptions, our findings show that SFT plays a crucial role across several scenarios: (1) Effectiveness for weaker models. SFT more reliably elicits reasoning capabilities in smaller or weaker VLMs. (2) Data efficiency. SFT with only 2K achieves comparable or better reasoning performance to RL with 20K. (3) Cross-modal transferability. SFT demonstrates stronger generalization across modalities. Moreover, we identify a pervasive issue of deceptive rewards, where higher rewards fail to correlate with better reasoning accuracy in RL. These results challenge the prevailing "RL over SFT" narrative. They highlight that the role of SFT may have been underestimated and support a more balanced post-training pipeline in which SFT and RL function as complementary components.

An Enhanced Federated Prototype Learning Method under Domain Shift

Federated Learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. Numerous studies have shown that one significant factor affecting the performance of federated learning models is the heterogeneity of data across different clients, especially when the data is sampled from various domains. A recent paper introduces variance-aware dual-level prototype clustering and uses a novel $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss, which increases intra-class similarity and reduces inter-class similarity. To ensure that the features converge within specific clusters, we introduce an improved algorithm, Federated Prototype Learning with Convergent Clusters, abbreviated as FedPLCC. To increase inter-class distances, we weight each prototype with the size of the cluster it represents. To reduce intra-class distances, considering that prototypes with larger distances might come from different domains, we select only a certain proportion of prototypes for the loss function calculation. Evaluations on the Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets show that our method performs better than existing approaches.

Not all Minorities are Equal: Empty-Class-Aware Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Data heterogeneity, characterized by disparities in local data distribution across clients, poses a significant challenge in federated learning. Substantial efforts have been devoted to addressing the heterogeneity in local label distribution. As minority classes suffer from worse accuracy due to overfitting on local imbalanced data, prior methods often incorporate class-balanced learning techniques during local training. Despite the improved mean accuracy across all classes, we observe that empty classes-referring to categories absent from a client's data distribution-are still not well recognized. This paper introduces FedED, a novel approach in heterogeneous federated learning that integrates both empty-class distillation and logit suppression simultaneously. Specifically, empty-class distillation leverages knowledge distillation during local training on each client to retain essential information related to empty classes from the global model. Moreover, logit suppression directly penalizes network logits for non-label classes, effectively addressing misclassifications in minority classes that may be biased toward majority classes. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of FedED, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods across diverse datasets with varying degrees of label distribution shift.