Unifying ICL, SFT, KL-Regularized RL Through a Bayesian Lens

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.05111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are now trained and evaluated under a diverse set of paradigms: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), few-shot in-context learning (ICL), KL-regularized RLHF/RLVR, on-policy distillation (OPD), and test-time reasoning with search and chain-of-thought. These methods are often discussed as fundamentally different, and recent empirical results--such as the mixed impact of few-shot prompting on RL-tuned reasoning models--can appear puzzling. This note develops a Bayesian perspective that puts these procedures on the same footing. At the core is a two-step template: (i) construct a (generalized) Bayes or Gibbs posterior q* over outputs or actions given a context, using a prior/reference model and a utility signal (log-likelihood, rew