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Large language models provide rich semantic priors and strong reasoning capabilities, making them promising auxiliary signals for recommendation. However, prevailing approaches either deploy LLMs as standalone recommender or apply global…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Shanglin Yang , Zhan Shi

Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Dataset distillation compresses a large dataset into a small synthetic dataset such that learning on the synthetic dataset approximates learning on the original. Training on the distilled dataset can be performed in as little as one step of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Connor Wilhelm , Dan Ventura

Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student by aligning their predictive distributions. However, conventional KD formulations - typically based on Kullback-Leibler divergence - assume that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ondrej Tybl , Lukas Neumann

Traditional black-box distillation for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically relies on a single teacher response per input, which often yields high-variance responses and format inconsistencies in multimodal or temporal scenarios.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Songlin Li , Xin Zhu , Zechao Guan , Peipeng Chen , Jian Yao

Knowledge distillation is a popular technique for training a small student network to emulate a larger teacher model, such as an ensemble of networks. We show that while knowledge distillation can improve student generalization, it does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Samuel Stanton , Pavel Izmailov , Polina Kirichenko , Alexander A. Alemi , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Knowledge distillation is used, in generative language modeling, to train a smaller student model using the help of a larger teacher model, resulting in improved capabilities for the student model. In this paper, we formulate a more general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Guanlin Liu , Anand Ramachandran , Tanmay Gangwani , Yan Fu , Abhinav Sethy

Large language models (LLMs) trained for step-by-step reasoning often become excessively verbose, raising inference cost. Standard Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) pipelines filter out ``easy'' problems for training…

Accurate clinical diagnosis requires extensive domain knowledge and complex clinical reasoning capabilities. Although large language models (LLMs) hold great potential for clinical reasoning, their high computational and memory requirements…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xinchun Su , Chunxu Luo , Lipeng Ma , Yixuan Li , Weidong Yang

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its feasibility in solving combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). The learning-to-rank techniques have been studied in the field of information retrieval. While several COPs can be…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Honguk Woo , Hyunsung Lee , Sangwoo Cho

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mengqi Liao , Xiangyu Xi , Ruinian Chen , Jia Leng , Yangen Hu , Ke Zeng , Shuai Liu , Huaiyu Wan

Reinforcement learning (RL) research focuses on general solutions that can be applied across different domains. This results in methods that RL practitioners can use in almost any domain. However, recent studies often lack the engineering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Anssi Kanervisto , Christian Scheller , Yanick Schraner , Ville Hautamäki

We explore a novel perspective of knowledge distillation (KD) for learning to rank (LTR), and introduce Self-Distilled neural Rankers (SDR), where student rankers are parameterized identically to their teachers. Unlike the existing ranking…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Zhen Qin , Le Yan , Yi Tay , Honglei Zhuang , Xuanhui Wang , Michael Bendersky , Marc Najork

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropy tokens drive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Xinzhu Chen , Xuesheng Li , Zhongxiang Sun , Weijie Yu

Knowledge distillation introduced in the deep learning context is a method to transfer knowledge from one architecture to another. In particular, when the architectures are identical, this is called self-distillation. The idea is to feed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Hossein Mobahi , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter L. Bartlett

Although transfer learning is considered to be a milestone in deep reinforcement learning, the mechanisms behind it are still poorly understood. In particular, predicting if knowledge can be transferred between two given tasks is still an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Valentin Guillet , Dennis G. Wilson , Carlos Aguilar-Melchor , Emmanuel Rachelson

Developing robotic agents that can perform well in diverse environments while showing a variety of behaviors is a key challenge in AI and robotics. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods often create agents that specialize in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Octi Zhang , Quanquan Peng , Rosario Scalise , Bryon Boots

Knowledge distillation has proven to be an effective technique in improving the performance a student model using predictions from a teacher model. However, recent work has shown that gains in average efficiency are not uniform across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Serena Wang , Harikrishna Narasimhan , Yichen Zhou , Sara Hooker , Michal Lukasik , Aditya Krishna Menon

Efficient Distillation (EDistill) compresses large language models (LLMs) by structured pruning parameters and tuning lightweight modules with high training efficiency. Although these EDistilled LLMs achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Junlin He , Yihong Tang , Tong Nie , Guilong Li , Binyu Yang , Jinxiao Du , Lijun Sun , Wei Ma

The enhancement of mathematical capabilities in large language models (LLMs) fosters new developments in mathematics education within primary and secondary schools, particularly as they relate to intelligent tutoring systems. However, LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zhenquan Shen , Xinguo Yu , Xiaotian Cheng , Rao Peng , Hao Ming