I briefly reviewed the paper "SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes," which compares SFT and RL in post-training of LLM/VLM from HKU, UC Berkeley, Google DeepMind, and New York University
The conclusion suggests SFT excels in memorization, while RL is better for generalization. However, since LLM/VLM should benefit humans beyond just generalization, a mix of SFT and RL is advisable. Typically, some SFT is followed by RL to understand prompt formats and enhance generalization through trial and error.
The study focused on one model, Llama-3.2-Vision-11B, using environments like General Points for arithmetic reasoning and V-IRL for spatial reasoning. Training data was used for both SFT and RL, with evaluations on in-distribution and out-of-distribution data to assess memorization and generalization.
I want to apply RL extensively, but it requires building a similar simulation environment. For domain-specific models, significant investment in creating a "playground" for the model is crucial, as the effort will directly influence the outcomes.
Yes, DeepSeek R1's release is impressive. But the real story is what happened in just 7 days after:
- Original release: 8 models, 540K downloads. Just the beginning...
- The community turned those open-weight models into +550 NEW models on Hugging Face. Total downloads? 2.5M—nearly 5X the originals.
The reason? DeepSeek models are open-weight, letting anyone build on top of them. Interesting to note that the community focused on quantized versions for better efficiency & accessibility. They want models that use less memory, run faster, and are more energy-efficient.
When you empower builders, innovation explodes. For everyone. 🚀
The most popular community model? @bartowski's DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-GGUF version — 1M downloads alone.