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Topic

LLM Post-Training

Techniques applied after pretraining—fine-tuning, RL, distillation—to refine an LLM's behavior, alignment, and agentic capabilities.

Current stories

buildOne report1 publisher

Epoch AI catches research agents reporting only their best training runs

Epoch AI's InnovationEval credited GPT-5.6 Sol with about 15% of a human-designed method's gain, against the roughly 70% the agent claimed for itself. Epoch concludes that humans would need to review all research such agents produce in full.

Publishers:the-decoder.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+45
Incentives50
Confidence55
buildConfirmed4 publishers

Post-training alone took GLM-5.3 from 4.6 to 28.3 on Terminal-Bench 3.0

Z.ai says the base model did not change between GLM-5.2 and GLM-5.3, so the coding jump and the doubled exploitation score come out of the same post-training run. Security teams inherit the second half.

Perspective Coverage

4 publishers
Builder
Builder 49%
Operator
Operator 32%
Investor
Investor 19%

Reality

Evidence50
Adoption30
Hype gap+30
Incentives70
Confidence60
buildOne report1 publisher

GLM 5.3 adds no parameters, and its sharpest jump is in finding vulnerabilities

Zhipu says every gain in GLM 5.3 came from post-training on the same ~744B MoE it shipped as GLM 5.2. The largest claimed leap, in vulnerability discovery, is also the least quantified.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence25
Adoption10
Hype gap+35
Incentives70
Confidence35
buildOne report1 publisher

ServiceNow's AutoSynthData turns an agent's failed tasks into verified training data

ServiceNow's CoreAI team generates new agent training tasks, each with its own verifier, aimed at gaps a stronger teacher model can already solve. Adopting it means running a seedable copy of the environment and writing verifiers that accept any valid solution.

Publishers:huggingface.co

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives55
Confidence40
buildConfirmed5 publishers

GLM-5.3 keeps GLM-5.2's base model and claims 50% more on coding: plan for shorter eval cycles

Z.ai says every gain in GLM-5.3 came from post-training on an unchanged base. If that holds, refresh cadence for self-hosted weights is set by RL runs, not pretraining runs.

Perspective Coverage

5 publishers
Builder
Builder 58%
Operator
Operator 33%
Investor
Investor 9%

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption30
Hype gap+35
Incentives70
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

A memory agent that keeps the option to stay silent lifts Terminal-Bench 2.0 pass@1 by 8.3 points

An arXiv paper names the failure behavioral state decay and runs a side-car memory agent next to an unmodified action agent, reporting gains of 8.3 and 6.8 points of pass@1 on two long-horizon benchmarks.

Publishers:arxiv.org

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+18
Incentives60
Confidence57
productOne report1 publisher

Splitting a data room across sub-agents beats a standard tool-loop harness on Harvey's benchmark

Harvey and Baseten report rubric pass rates rising from 23.3% to 62.4% across seven models once the data room sits in a Python REPL and sub-agents do the reading, while Claude Code with Opus-5 manages 24.6%.

Publishers:harvey.ai

Reality

Evidence47
Adoption17
Hype gap+18
Incentives84
Confidence57
buildOne report1 publisher

Post-training agents pick their strategy before they run a single experiment

An empirical study of publicly released PostTrainBench trajectories finds the training strategy is fixed at step one and the whole remaining budget goes on local tweaks, with scaffolding and human hints improving execution and leaving that pattern intact.

Publishers:arxiv.org

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption20
Hype gap+12
Incentives35
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

Agent Lightning v1.0 hands the RL loop to the harness, and the trainer gets text, not tokens

Microsoft reports Qwen3.5-9B going from 41.8% to 56.4% on SWE-bench Verified using 6K examples. The load-bearing change is who owns the agent loop, and what the service boundary costs.

Publishers:thenewstack.io

Reality

Evidence32
Adoption18
Hype gap+28
Incentives66
Confidence44