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Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Walid Bousselham , Hilde Kuehne , Cordelia Schmid

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under token-level teacher supervision, but existing methods are capped by a single-teacher capability ceiling: when the teacher errs, the student inherits the error. OPD…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jianze Wang , Ying Liu , Jinlong Chen , Xuchun Hu , Qilong Zhang , Yu Cao , Jun Wang , Hua Yang , Yong Xie , Qianglong Chen

The push to compress and impart the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) into more deployable and efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) has benefited from improvements in knowledge distillation (KD) techniques. These techniques…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Shreyansh Padarha

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qiyong Zhong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Xin Lin , Jie Sun , Houcheng Jiang , Xiang Wang , Junfeng Fang

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Pengfei Liu

On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable performances across various complex tasks by leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, studies have proposed a Knowledge Distillation (KD) approach, reasoning distillation,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Hojae Lee , Junho Kim , SangKeun Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention owing to their powerful logical reasoning capabilities. Generally, larger LLMs (L-LLMs) that require paid interfaces exhibit significantly superior performance compared to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dong Chen , Shilin Zhang , Fei Gao , Yueting Zhuang , Siliang Tang , Qidong Liu , Mingliang Xu

Knowledge distillation is a key technique for transferring the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Existing distillation approaches often overlook two critical factors: the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jincheng Cao , Fanzhi Zeng , Leqi Liu , Aryan Mokhtari

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard route to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) into compact students, yet most pipelines uniformly apply token-wise loss regardless of teacher confidence. This indiscriminate supervision amplifies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Haiduo Huang , Jiangcheng Song , Yadong Zhang , Pengju Ren

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a promising technique for reducing the high computational demand of large language models (LLMs). However, previous KD methods are primarily applied to white-box classification models or training small models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional reasoning capabilities, often achieving state-of-the-art performance in various tasks. However, their substantial computational and memory demands, due to billions of parameters, hinder…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Xunyu Zhu , Jian Li , Can Ma , Weiping Wang

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression method that can transfer the internal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones. However, the multi-modal probability distribution predicted by teacher LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Tianyu Peng , Jiajun Zhang

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yuanyi Wang , Su Lu , Yanggan Gu , Pengkai Wang , Yifan Yang , Zhaoyi Yan , Congkai Xie , Jianmin Wu , Hongxia Yang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

Policy distillation, which transfers a teacher policy to a student policy has achieved great success in challenging tasks of deep reinforcement learning. This teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Kwei-Herng Lai , Daochen Zha , Yuening Li , Xia Hu

Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jeonghye Kim , Xufang Luo , Minbeom Kim , Sangmook Lee , Dohyung Kim , Jiwon Jeon , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zhaoyang Zhang , Shuli Jiang , Yantao Shen , Yuting Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Shuo Yang , Zhuowen Tu , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guobin Shen , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Lei Huang , Jindong Li , Dongcheng Zhao , Xing Yu