Rethinking Supervised Fine-Tuning: Emphasizing Key Answer Tokens for Improved LLM Accuracy

2025/12/24 by Xiaofeng Shi, Qian Kou, Shi, Xiaofeng +5
Computer Science · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Component (thermodynamics) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Correctness #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Focus (optics) #Key (lock) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Structured prediction #Task (project management) #Topic Modeling

paper · open access · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.21017

published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)

openalex publication_date 2025/12/24 · openalex created_date 2025/12/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) component has become significant for complex reasoning tasks. However, in conventional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), the model could allocate disproportionately more attention to CoT sequences with excessive length. This reduces focus on the much shorter but essential Key portion-the final answer, whose correctness directly determines task success and evaluation quality. To address this limitation, we propose SFTKey, a two-stage training scheme. In the first stage, conventional SFT is applied to ensure proper output format, while in the second stage, only the Key portion is fine-tuned to improve accuracy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and model families demonstrate that SFTKey achieves an average accuracy improvement exceeding 5% over conventional SFT, while preserving the ability to generate correct formats. Overall, this study advances LLM fine-tuning by explicitly balancing CoT learning with additional optimization on answer-relevant tokens.

Citations

• Forgetting: A New Mechanism Towards Better Large Language Model Fine-tuning
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• BNAI, NO-TOKEN, and MIND-UNITY: Pillars of a Systemic Revolution in Artificial Intelligence
• Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
• A Few More Examples May Be Worth Billions of Parameters
• Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering

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• Enhancing the Reasoning Capabilities of Small Language Models via\n Solution Guidance Fine-Tuning
• Thinking Preference Optimization