Related papers: Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillation

Recent studies have shown that Transformers can perform in-context reinforcement learning (RL) by imitating existing RL algorithms, enabling sample-efficient adaptation to unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, these models also…

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…

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Dynamic diagnosis is desirable when medical tests are costly or time-consuming. In this work, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to find a dynamic policy that selects lab test panels sequentially based on previous observations, ensuring…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

Reinforcement learning can train LLM agents from sparse task rewards, but long-horizon credit assignment remains challenging: a single success-or-failure signal must be distributed across many actions. Existing methods rely on…

In modern large language models (LLMs), LLM alignment is of crucial importance and is typically achieved through methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). However, in most…

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…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in training large reasoning models (LRMs) by leveraging answer-verifiable signals to guide policy optimization, which, however, suffers from high annotation costs.…

In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, slow inference speed and huge footprints in GPU usage remain the bottleneck of applying pre-trained deep models in production. As a popular method for model compression, knowledge distillation…

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve explicit chain-of-thought expansion by imitating deep thinking behaviors of humans, demonstrating excellent performance in complex task scenarios. However, the deep-thinking mode often leads to…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works…

Today's advanced Reinforcement Learning algorithms produce black-box policies, that are often difficult to interpret and trust for a person. We introduce a policy distilling algorithm, building on the CN2 rule mining algorithm, that…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing group-based RLVR methods often suffer from severe…

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference…