Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) as the Objective for Supervised Fine-Tuning

A development team is fine-tuning a pre-trained language model using a curated dataset of customer support inquiries (inputs) and their corresponding ideal, human-written responses (outputs). The aim is to create a specialized chatbot that reliably provides answers in the same helpful and accurate style as the examples. From a probabilistic perspective, which statement best describes the fundamental objective of this training process?

Correcting a Flawed Fine-Tuning Objective

Objective for a Specialized Math Tutor

Mathematical Formulation of the Supervised Fine-Tuning Objective

Conditional vs. Joint Probability Objectives in Language Modeling