{"paper":{"title":"Reconciling Contradictory Views on the Effectiveness of SFT in LLMs: An Interaction Perspective","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Guoxi Zhang, Hua Cai, Junpeng Zhang, Lei Cheng, Qing Xu, Quanshi Zhang","submitted_at":"2026-05-18T07:22:54Z","abstract_excerpt":"This paper explores a scientific question in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): why SFT is broadly effective for small-scale deep neural networks, yet can produce inconsistent or even detrimental effects when applied to large language models (LLMs). Recent advances in interaction-based explanations suggest that interactions between words/tokens provide a faithful metric for quantifying the inference patterns encoded by LLMs. We find that the evolution of interactions during SFT can effectively explain the inconsistent effectiveness of SFT for LLMs. Specifically, we find that (1) SFT primarily remov"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.17967","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.17967/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[{"name":"ai_meta_artifact","ran_at":"2026-05-19T23:33:35.579680Z","status":"skipped","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0}],"snapshot_sha256":"8c34e9aea29cdb5411860450866b3dee13a34a204bfcff6edc5983d3ae4fa0f0"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}