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Knowledge Distillation (KD) for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important as models grow in size and complexity. While existing distillation approaches focus on imitating teacher behavior, they often overlook the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large-scale language models (LLMs), yet prevailing logit-based methods typically employ static strategies that are misaligned with the dynamic learning process of student…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Xurong Xie , Zhucun Xue , Jiafu Wu , Jian Li , Yabiao Wang , Xiaobin Hu , Yong Liu , Jiangning Zhang

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has proven effective for compressing large teacher models into smaller student models. While it is well known that student models can achieve similar accuracies as the teachers, it has also been shown that they…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Amin Parchami-Araghi , Moritz Böhle , Sukrut Rao , Bernt Schiele

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) enhances the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its limitations have led to the development of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), an RL-free approach designed to overcome…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Aswin RRV , Kashif Rasul , Chitta Baral

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for aligning policies with human judgments, yet its theoretical behavior in distributed settings where preference data are fragmented across heterogeneous users remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhanhong Jiang

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yufei Ma , Zihan Liang , Ben Chen , Zhipeng Qian , Huangyu Dai , Lingtao Mao , Xuxin Zhang , Chenyi Lei , Wenwu Ou

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is a critical challenge in AI research. While methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are widely used, they often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xuan Qi , Rongwu Xu , Zhijing Jin

Multi-teacher Knowledge Distillation (KD) transfers diverse knowledge from a teacher pool to a student network. The core problem of multi-teacher KD is how to balance distillation strengths among various teachers. Most existing methods…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Chuanguang Yang , Xinqiang Yu , Han Yang , Zhulin An , Chengqing Yu , Libo Huang , Yongjun Xu

Online on-policy preference learning algorithms for language model alignment such as online direct policy optimization (DPO) can significantly outperform their offline counterparts. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juno Kim , Jihun Yun , Jason D. Lee , Kwang-Sung Jun

Enhancing the conformity of large language models (LLMs) to human preferences remains an ongoing research challenge. Recently, offline approaches such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have gained prominence as attractive options due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Kaihui Chen , Hao Yi , Qingyang Li , Tianyu Qi , Yulan Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Without using explicit reward, direct preference optimization (DPO) employs paired human preference data to fine-tune generative models, a method that has garnered considerable attention in large language models (LLMs). However, exploration…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Yunhong Lu , Qichao Wang , Hengyuan Cao , Xierui Wang , Xiaoyin Xu , Min Zhang

Direct Preference Optimization is an offline post-SFT method for aligning language models from preference pairs, with strong results in instruction following and summarization. However, DPO's sequence-level implicit reward can be brittle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Samah Fodeh , Linhai Ma , Ganesh Puthiaraju , Srivani Talakokkul , Afshan Khan , Ashley Hagaman , Sarah R. Lowe , Aimee Kendall Roundtree

Efficient preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become a popular approach in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. These algorithms implicitly treat the LLM as a reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Tong Liu , Xiao Yu , Wenxuan Zhou , Jindong Gu , Volker Tresp

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Bo Wang , Qinyuan Cheng , Runyu Peng , Rong Bao , Peiji Li , Qipeng Guo , Linyang Li , Zhiyuan Zeng , Yunhua Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been widely adopted for preference alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, DPO is derived as a bandit problem in which the whole response is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Aiwei Liu , Haoping Bai , Zhiyun Lu , Yanchao Sun , Xiang Kong , Simon Wang , Jiulong Shan , Albin Madappally Jose , Xiaojiang Liu , Lijie Wen , Philip S. Yu , Meng Cao

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for safe and effective AI interactions. While popular methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have simplified alignment, they remain sensitive to data noise…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ning Yang , Hai Lin , Yibo Liu , Baoliang Tian , Guoqing Liu , Haijun Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions is crucial for their utility, honesty, and safety. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular approach to achieve this alignment, but it faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Junkang Wu , Xue Wang , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Qi Gou , Cam-Tu Nguyen

Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Weichen Yu , Xiaomin Li , Yizhou Zhao , Xiaoze Liu , Ruowang Zhang , Haixin Wang , Yinyi Luo , Chen Henry Wu , Gaurav Mittal , Matt Fredrikson , Yu Hu