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EMNLP Findings2024

Self-Evolution Fine-Tuning for Policy Optimization

Ruijun Chen, Jiehao Liang, Shiping Gao, Fanqi Wan, Xiaojun Quan

Abstract

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial not only for unlocking their potential in specific tasks but also for ensuring that responses meet human expectations and adhere to safety and ethical principles. To address the challenges of current alignment methodologies, we introduce self-evolution fine-tuning (SEFT) for LLM alignment, aiming to eliminate the need for annotated samples while retaining the stability and efficiency of SFT. SEFT first trains an adaptive reviser to elevate low-quality responses while maintaining highquality ones. The reviser then gradually guides the policy's optimization by fine-tuning it with enhanced responses. The method excels in utilizing unlimited unannotated data to optimize policies via supervised fine-tuning. Our experiments on AlpacaEval 2.0 and MT-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of SEFT and its advantages over existing alignment techniques.

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. One Refiner to Unlock Them All: Inference-Time Reasoning Elicitation via Reinforcement Query RefinementYixiao Zhou, Dongzhou Cheng, Zhiliang Wu, Yi Yang et al.ACL 2026 · 3 citations

Builds on4

  1. Iterative Preference Learning from Human Feedback: Bridging Theory and Practice for RLHF under KL-constraintWei Xiong, Hanze Dong, Chenlu Ye, Ziqi Wang et al.ICML 2024 · 346 citations
  2. OpenChat: Advancing Open-source Language Models with Mixed-Quality DataGuan Wang, Sijie Cheng, Xianyuan Zhan, Xiangang Li et al.ICLR 2024 · 328 citations
  3. Is DPO Superior to PPO for LLM Alignment? A Comprehensive StudyShusheng Xu, Wei Fu, Jiaxuan Gao, Wenjie Ye et al.ICML 2024 · 274 citations
  4. Advancing LLM Reasoning Generalists with Preference TreesLifan Yuan, Ganqu Cui, Hanbin Wang, Ning Ding et al.ICLR 2025

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  2. SAFT: Safety-Preserving Adaptation via Fine-Tuning Transfer for Large Language ModelsZhiwen Ruan, Yan Yang, Zhuocheng Liang, Yun Chen et al.KDD 2026
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  5. ReAlign: Structured Revision for Small Language Model AlignmentRuijun Chen, Jiajian Guo, Hongzhan Chen, Fanqi Wan et al.EMNLP Findings 2025 · 1 citation
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