Why Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Enables MLLMs Preserve Prior Knowledge Better: A Data Perspective

Zhihao Zhang, Qiaole Dong, Qi Zhang, Enyu Zhou, Jun Zhao, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Xiaoran Fan, Yuhao Zhou, Mingqi Wu, Yanwei Fu, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Kai Chen

Keywords: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning, Catastrophic Forgetting, Data Distribution, Learning Dynamics

Abstract: Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining prior knowledge remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce jigsaw puzzles as a novel task absent from existing pretraining corpora and systematically study the behavior of SFT and RFT on the open-source Qwen2.5-VL series. Our experiments reveal a sharp trade-off: SFT enables rapid task acquisition but leads to catastrophic forgetting, whereas RFT learns more slowly but better maintains prior knowledge. We study this phenomenon through learning dynamics by examining both the magnitude and direction of how training data influence prior knowledge. Our analysis shows that RFT mainly reinforces correct samples naturally aligned with the base model’s probability landscape, leading to weaker interference with prior knowledge. Moreover, training on RFT-simulated rollouts, which exert a smaller magnitude of influence and are better aligned in direction to prior knowledge, allows SFT to preserve prior knowledge better while rapidly learning new tasks. We further validate our framework on Qwen2.5 post-training in math and scientific QA, observing consistent forgetting and learning-dynamics trends. These findings suggest that the distribution of post-training data, rather than algorithmic differences alone, plays a central role in forgetting, and highlight RFT as a promising ingredient for stable continual post-training.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 3775