Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models (LMs) with human preferences post pre-training. While SFT excels in efficiency and PO in effectiveness, they are often combined sequentially without integrating their optimization objectives. This approach ignores the opportunities to bridge their paradigm gap and take the strengths from both. In this paper, we interpret SFT and PO with two sub-processes — *Preference Estimation* and *Transition Optimization* — defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP). This modeling shows that SFT is only a special case of PO with inferior estimation and optimization. PO estimates the model’s preference by its entire generation, while SFT only scores model’s subsequent predicted tokens based on prior tokens from ground truth answer. These priors deviates from model’s distribution, hindering the preference estimation and transition optimization. Building on this view, we introduce **Intuitive Fine-Tuning (IFT)** to integrate SFT and PO into a single process. Through a temporal residual connection, IFT brings better estimation and optimization by capturing LMs’ intuitive sense of its entire answers. But it solely relies on a single policy and the same volume of non-preference-labeled data as SFT. Our experiments show that IFT performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. An explainable Frozen Lake game further validates the effectiveness of IFT for getting competitive policy.

Peer review is essential for scientific progress but faces growing challenges due to increasing submission volumes and reviewer fatigue. Existing automated review approaches struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth, often generating superficial or generic feedback lacking the insights characteristic of high-quality human reviews. We introduce ReviewRL, a reinforcement learning framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews. Our approach combines: (1) an ArXiv-MCP retrieval-augmented context generation pipeline that incorporates relevant scientific literature, (2) supervised fine-tuning that establishes foundational reviewing capabilities, and (3) a reinforcement learning procedure with a composite reward function that jointly enhances review quality and rating accuracy. Experiments on ICLR 2025 papers demonstrate that ReviewRL significantly outperforms existing methods across both rule-based metrics and model-based quality assessments. ReviewRL establishes a foundational framework for RL-driven automatic critique generation in scientific discovery, demonstrating promising potential for future development in this domain. The implementation of ReviewRL will be released at GitHub.

Recent studies indicate that LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) encounter scalability challenges in complex mathematical problem-solving or coding tasks, exhibiting issues such as inconsistent role adherence and ineffective inter-agent communication. Moreover, the performance advantages of LLM-based MAS over a single agent employing test-time scaling methods (e.g., majority voting) remain marginal. This raises a critical question: Can LLM-based MAS scale effectively to achieve performance comparable to standalone LLMs or even Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) under optimal test-time compute?In this paper, we conduct a preliminary investigation into the scalability of LLM-based MAS for scientific code generation. We propose a simple yet scalable two-player framework based on iterative critic-in-the-loop refinement. Our experiments demonstrate that a minimalist actor-critic framework based on DeepSeek-V3 can outperform DeepSeek-R1 under equivalent computational budgets. Surprisingly, more complex frameworks fail to yield significant gains. These findings corroborate recent insights into multi-agent system limitations and highlight the importance of scalable workflows for advancing scientific code generation.