monolithic

Definition

Describes doing in one piece what is normally split into stages — as in ORPO's "monolithic preference optimization", where supervised fine-tuning and alignment collapse into one objective. Fewer stages means fewer hyperparameters and less pipeline to reproduce, at the cost of not being able to tune or swap a stage independently. In software architecture the same word is the foil to microservices and usually carries a negative charge; in method names it is a selling point.