Related papers: Critique-Guided Distillation for Robust Reasoning …

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a compact student counterpart, often coming with a significant performance gap between them. We find that a too-large performance gap can hamper the training…

Knowledge Distillation (KD) can transfer the reasoning abilities of large models to smaller ones, which can reduce the costs to generate Chain-of-Thoughts for reasoning tasks. KD methods typically ask the student to mimic the teacher's…

While large language models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks, their huge size and the inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. Previous studies try to distill task-specific ability…

We study self-distillation in settings where supervision is unreliable: there are no ground truth labels, verifiable rewards, or external graders to evaluate answers. We focus on document-grounded question answering with asymmetric context,…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

We have witnessed that strong LLMs like Qwen-Math, MiMo, and Phi-4 possess immense reasoning potential inherited from the pre-training stage. With reinforcement learning (RL), these models can improve dramatically on reasoning tasks. Recent…

Learning generative models directly from corrupted observations is a long standing challenge across natural and scientific domains. We introduce Restoration Score Distillation (RSD), a unified framework for learning high fidelity, one step…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves knowledge-intensive question answering by incorporating external evidence. However, existing RAG methods still suffer from hallucinations and subtle reasoning errors. Recent studies introduce…

Distilling reasoning paths from teacher to student models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides a shortcut for improving the reasoning ability of smaller Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reasoning paths generated by teacher…

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Recent research on knowledge distillation has increasingly focused on logit distillation because of its simplicity, effectiveness, and versatility in model compression. In this paper, we introduce Refined Logit Distillation (RLD) to address…

Reasoning-oriented language models achieve strong performance by generating long chain-of-thought traces at inference time. However, this capability comes with substantial and often excessive computational cost, which can materialize in…

Generative models are transforming creative domains such as music generation, with inference-time strategies like Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) playing a crucial role. However, CFG doubles inference cost while limiting originality and…

Guidance in image generation steers models towards higher-quality or more targeted outputs, typically achieved in Diffusion Models (DMs) via Classifier-free Guidance (CFG). However, recent Consistency Models (CMs), which offer fewer…

Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT), a recently proposed Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, has attracted widespread attention for significantly improving parameter efficiency by editing representation space alone. In this work,…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. While knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent method for this, research on KD for…

On-policy self-distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training language models, in which the model conditions on environment feedback to serve as its own teacher, providing dense token-level rewards without external…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective framework to transfer knowledge from a large-scale teacher to a compact yet well-performing student. Previous KD practices for pre-trained language models mainly transfer knowledge by aligning…

Hand-crafting high quality prompts to optimize the performance of language models is a complicated and labor-intensive process. Furthermore, when migrating to newer, smaller, or weaker models (possibly due to latency or cost gains), prompts…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a well-known method to reduce inference latency by compressing a cumbersome teacher model to a small student model. Despite the success of KD in the classification task, applying KD to recommender models is…