# A Post-Training Enhanced Optimization Approach for Small Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 5 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Systematic Optimization of Open Source Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07238/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper delves into the continuous post-training optimization methods for small language models, and proposes a continuous post-training alignment data construction method for small language models. The core of this method is based on the data guidance of large models, optimizing the diversity and accuracy of alignment data. In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the methods in this paper, we used Qwen2-0.5B-Instruct model as the baseline model for small language models, using the alignment dataset constructed by our proposed method, we trained and compared several groups of experiments, including SFT (Supervised Fine Tuning) post-training experiment and KTO (Kahneman Tversky optimization) post-training experiment, as well as SFT-KTO two-stage post-training experiment and model weight fusion experiment. Finally, we evaluated and analyzed the performance of post-training models, and confirmed that the continuous post-training optimization method proposed by us can significantly improve the performance of small language models.