Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Survey

Yongcan Yu, Kuangpu Guo, Jian Liang, Lingxiao He, Meng Wang, Ran He


Abstract
Large reasoning models have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks, where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long chain-of-thought data serves as a crucial foundation for eliciting and enhancing their reasoning abilities. Despite rapid progress in both improving and analyzing reasoning-oriented SFT, the field still lacks a systematic survey that consolidates its fast-growing literature. To fill this gap, we present a comprehensive review of recent advancements in reasoning SFT, examining the literature through the dual lenses of methodological design and analytical investigation. First, we review methodological improvements across the SFT pipeline and categorize them into data-centric approaches and algorithm-centric innovations. Second, we reorganize analytical studies along three dimensions: data characteristics, optimization dynamics, and mechanistic insights. Finally, by synthesizing current research focuses and remaining bottlenecks, we outline promising future directions for reasoning SFT. We hope this survey deepens the understanding of reasoning SFT and paves the way for advanced reasoning models.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1189
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
27240–27273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1189/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yongcan Yu, Kuangpu Guo, Jian Liang, Lingxiao He, Meng Wang, and Ran He. 2026. Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Survey. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 27240–27273, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Survey (Yu et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1189.pdf