Noise-Aware Adaptive Mixing for Hybrid SFT–RL Post-Training
This is the public compact-backbone release of GAC, a closed-form,
noise-aware controller that adaptively mixes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and
reinforcement learning (RL) signals during post-training.
The release is designed for researchers who want to study adaptive SFT–RL
post-training with a contemporary, accessible model backbone. The algorithmic
implementation, evaluation harness, and method description are available in
the GAC repository.
GAC on a modern 4B backbone
We retrained GAC on Qwen3.5-4B to bring adaptive hybrid SFT–RL
post-training to a modern, capable small-model backbone. This release follows
progress in compact language models while making GAC more accessible for
research, evaluation, and deployment with modest compute resources.
Model details
- Base model: Qwen3.5-4B-Base
- Post-training method: GAC (hybrid SFT–RL adaptive mixing)
- Parameter scale: approximately 4B language-model parameters
- Format: Hugging Face Transformers /
safetensors
- Transformers compatibility: use Transformers 5.10.4 or newer with native
Qwen3.5 support
- Modalities: the checkpoint retains the Qwen3.5 text-and-vision model
interface; the reported evaluation is text-only reasoning and coding
- License: Apache-2.0, subject to the upstream Qwen3.5 license and notices
Intended use
This checkpoint is intended for research on adaptive hybrid SFT–RL
post-training, reproducible checkpoint evaluation, and low-cost experimentation
with compact multimodal language models. It is not a safety-certified system
and should not be used for unsupervised high-stakes decisions.
Release contents
The release provides inference weights, model and tokenizer configuration,
licensing notices, and an evaluation summary. The public GAC implementation
and evaluator accompany the checkpoint to support research and checkpoint
benchmarking.
Evaluation snapshot
The table below reports the compact-backbone evaluation snapshot for the base
checkpoint and the GAC release checkpoint. Percentages are author-reported
release metrics; a rerun with the public evaluator writes exact
per-example counts and summaries.
Table with columns: Domain, Benchmark, Eval size (N), Qwen3.5-4B Base, GAC release| Domain | Benchmark | Eval size (N) | Qwen3.5-4B Base | GAC release |
|---|
| Mathematics | AMC | 83 | 19.3% | 67.5% |
| Mathematics | AIME24 | 30 | 0.0% | 26.7% |
| Mathematics | AIME25 | 30 | 3.3% | |
The table compares the Qwen3.5-4B base checkpoint with the GAC release.
Values describe a fixed evaluation snapshot. Multiple seeds and per-example
outputs support more detailed statistical comparisons. BBH average is the
unweighted mean of the three displayed BBH slice scores.
Reading the result
Relative to the Qwen3.5-4B base snapshot, the GAC release is higher on 9 of 11
task slices in this snapshot, with gains across math, knowledge, science, and
code. BBH remains in a high-performance regime: the macro-average is higher,
while Object Counting and Tracking are slightly below the base snapshot. This
is descriptive evidence for transfer to a compact backbone, not a claim of
universal improvement.
Evaluation protocol
For an apples-to-apples rerun, use the public evaluator with --n_samples 1
and record the model revision, software versions, dataset revision, and seed.
The harness uses the following task-specific defaults:
Table with columns: Task family, Decoding, Scoring| Task family | Decoding | Scoring |
|---|
| AMC / AIME24 / AIME25 | temperature 0.6, top-p 0.95, max 8,192 tokens | math-verify equivalence |
| MMLU-Pro / GPQA-Diamond | temperature 0.6, top-p 0.95, max 8,192 tokens | strict answer-letter match |
| SciBench | temperature 0.6, top-p 0.95, max 8,192 tokens | SymPy equivalence plus numeric fallback |
| MBPP / HumanEval | temperature 0.2, top-p 0.95, max 1,024 tokens | isolated pass@1 execution |
| BBH logical subsets |
Dataset IDs, splits, fixed-subset selection, and the required example counts
are maintained in eval/README.md.
The evaluator pins MMLU-Pro to revision
b189ec765aa7ed75c8acfea42df31fdae71f97be with a public 1,000-ID manifest for
reruns. GPQA-Diamond requires gated dataset access or a lawfully obtained,
user-provided CSV through --gpqa_csv; GPQA data is not redistributed.
Quick start
import torch
from transformers import AutoProcessor, AutoModelForImageTextToText
model_id = "YueLinHu/GAC-Qwen3.5-4B"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
model_id,
torch_dtype="auto",
device_map="auto",
)
messages = [
{"role": "user", "content": [{"type": "text", "text": "Solve: 2 + 2 = ?"}]}
]
text = processor.apply_chat_template(
messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True
)
inputs = processor(text=[text], return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
with torch.inference_mode():
output_ids = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
print(processor.batch_decode(output_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0])
Install a current Transformers release with native Qwen3.5 support before
loading the checkpoint, for example pip install -U "transformers>=5.10.4".
Use the official Qwen3.5 documentation for multimodal inputs. For text-only
benchmark reproduction, follow the commands in the repository's
eval/README.md.
Reproducibility
The algorithmic implementation, default controller configuration, unit tests,
and evaluation harness are available at:
For scientifically comparable reporting, record the exact model revision,
transformers/vLLM version, decoding configuration, dataset revision, random
seed, pass@1 execution sandbox, and scoring parser. The values above are a
fixed release snapshot rather than multi-seed confidence intervals. When
n_samples is greater than one, the harness reports best-of-n for generated
answers; use n_samples=1 for the pass@1-style snapshot shown above.
Limitations and responsible use
- Benchmark accuracy is not a guarantee of reliability, factuality, or safety
in deployment.
- Code-generation outputs must be executed in an isolated sandbox.
- Reported values are a fixed evaluation snapshot; use repeated runs to
estimate statistical uncertainty.
- Users are responsible for complying with the licenses and usage policies of
Qwen3.5, the evaluation datasets, and any downstream application.
Citation
@inproceedings{hu2026gac,
title = {GAC: Noise-Aware Adaptive Mixing for Hybrid SFT-RL Post-Training},
author = {Hu, Yuelin and Liu, Wei and Yu, Zhenbo and Cheng, Zhengxue and Song, Li},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year = {2026},
address = {Budapest, Hungary},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=VhBpT4iq60}
}
Acknowledgements
This checkpoint builds on Qwen3.5 and the GAC post-training method. Please
cite both the GAC paper and the upstream Qwen3.5 model when appropriate.