arxivcs.LG2026-07-08
Online Data Selection Is Implicit Alignment
Aoxiong Zeng, Yuxin Yang, Xiangquan Yang
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning. This separation is incomplete: when examples are scored and kept online during fine-tuning, the choice of which…