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Partial observability is a notorious challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), due to the need to learn complex, history-dependent policies. Recent empirical successes have used privileged expert distillation--which leverages availability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Yuda Song , Dhruv Rohatgi , Aarti Singh , J. Andrew Bagnell

The exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to highlight the need for efficient strategies to meet ever-expanding computational and data demands. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of two complementary…

While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxuan Jiang , Runchao Li , Shubhashis Roy Dipta , Dawei Li , Zhao Yang

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Liang Lin , Chunxi Luo , Xin Xu , Kai Yang , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Tianxiang Zhao , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Unlike existing knowledge distillation methods focus on the baseline settings, where the teacher models and training strategies are not that strong and competing as state-of-the-art approaches, this paper presents a method dubbed DIST to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tao Huang , Shan You , Fei Wang , Chen Qian , Chang Xu

Knowledge distillation has become widely recognized for its ability to transfer knowledge from a large teacher network to a compact and more streamlined student network. Traditional knowledge distillation methods primarily follow a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Chaomin Shen , Yaomin Huang , Haokun Zhu , Jinsong Fan , Guixu Zhang

The widespread deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by the high computational demands, making knowledge distillation (KD) crucial for developing compact smaller ones. However, the conventional KD methods endure the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zengkui Sun , Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu , Jie Zhou

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex tasks through long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories, but directly transferring such reasoning processes to smaller models remains challenging. A key difficulty is that not all…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Chaoqun He , Yingfa Chen , Chaojun Xiao , Xu Han , Lijie Wen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for post-training LLM agents, yet its trajectory-level reward signal provides only coarse supervision for long-horizon interaction. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) complements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zhengxi Lu , Zhiyuan Yao , Zhuowen Han , Zi-Han Wang , Jinyang Wu , Qi Gu , Xunliang Cai , Weiming Lu , Jun Xiao , Yueting Zhuang , Yongliang Shen

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

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly influenced modern society, recently in particular through significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, high computational and storage demands of LLMs still limit their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Daniel Hendriks , Philipp Spitzer , Niklas Kühl , Gerhard Satzger

Specialized reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated that scaling test-time computation through detailed reasoning traces significantly enhances performance. Although these traces effectively facilitate knowledge distillation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Philip Lippmann , Jie Yang

Large language models (LLMs) are known to memorize parts of their training data, raising important concerns around privacy and security. While previous research has focused on studying memorization in pre-trained models, much less is known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Simardeep Singh

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…

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

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a fundamental technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) into compact, efficient student models. However, existing white-box KD methods mainly focus on balancing ground truth and student-generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Lingyuan Liu , Mengxiang Zhang

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a standard tool for transferring teacher behavior to a smaller student, but it implicitly assumes that teacher and student predictions are comparable token by token, an assumption that fails whenever the two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jie Sun , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Qiyong Zhong , Yilin Cheng , Bichuan Feng , Pengfei Liu , Junfeng Fang , Xiang Wang

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

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in recent natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their deployment poses substantial challenges due to high computational and memory demands in real-world…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Chenglin Li , Qianglong Chen , Liangyue Li , Caiyu Wang , Yicheng Li , Zulong Chen , Yin Zhang