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GIFT: Reconciling Post-Training Objectives via Variational Finite-Temperature Gibbs Initialization

Zhengyang Zhao Lu Ma Yizhen Jiang Xiaochen Ma Zimo Meng Chengyu Shen Lexiang Tang Haoze Sun Peng Pei Wentao Zhang
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Natural Language Processing

Abstract

The prevailing post-training paradigm for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)---Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL)-suffers from an intrinsic optimization mismatch: the rigid likelihood maximization in SFT induces distributional collapse, thereby exhausting the exploration space necessary for subsequent RL. Motivated by the Gibbs optimum of KL-regularized RL, we derive a token-level variational surrogate that makes the SFT target structurally compatible with the subsequent RL stage, and propose Gibbs Initialization with Finite Temperature (GIFT). Standard SFT emerges as a degenerate zero-temperature limit of this surrogate, while a finite temperature preserves structural diversity. Our experiments demonstrate that GIFT outperforms standard SFT and surpasses competitive baselines when utilized for RL initialization. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzy1127/GIFT.

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