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Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

Recent research enhances language model reasoning by scaling test-time compute via longer chain-of-thought traces. This often improves accuracy but also introduces redundancy and high computational cost, especially for small language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xuechen Zhang , Zijian Huang , Chenshun Ni , Ziyang Xiong , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

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

Despite substantial progress in multilingual extractive Question Answering (QA), models with high and uniformly distributed performance across languages remain challenging, especially for languages with limited resources. We study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Casimiro Pio Carrino , Carlos Escolano , José A. R. Fonollosa

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Large Reasoning Models(LRMs) such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute and generating long Chain-of-Thought(CoT). Distillation--post-training on LRMs-generated data--is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Huifeng Yin , Yu Zhao , Minghao Wu , Xuanfan Ni , Bo Zeng , Hao Wang , Tianqi Shi , Liangying Shao , Chenyang Lyu , Longyue Wang , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) provides dense token-level credit assignment for reinforcement learning with large language models by leveraging the model's own feedback-conditioned predictions as a self-teacher. Unlike GRPO,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zehao Liu , Yuanpu Cao , Jinghui Chen , Vasant G. Honavar

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

In many practical applications, large language models (LLMs) need to acquire new knowledge not present in their pre-training data. Efficiently leveraging this knowledge usually relies on supervised fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Kalle Kujanpää , Pekka Marttinen , Harri Valpola , Alexander Ilin

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained by reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on reasoning traces to improve their reasoning abilities. However, how these methods shape…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kohsei Matsutani , Shota Takashiro , Gouki Minegishi , Takeshi Kojima , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large language models have driven significant progress in natural language processing, but their deployment requires substantial compute and memory resources. As models scale, compression techniques become essential for balancing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Vithursan Thangarasa , Ganesh Venkatesh , Mike Lasby , Nish Sinnadurai , Sean Lie

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, SFT introduces distributional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sudong Wang , Weiquan Huang , Xiaomin Yu , Zuhao Yang , Hehai Lin , Keming Wu , Chaojun Xiao , Chen Chen , Wenxuan Wang , Beier Zhu , Yunjian Zhang , Chengwei Qin

Reasoning models leveraging long chains of thought employ various cognitive skills, such as verification of their answers, backtracking, retrying by an alternate method, and more. Previous work has shown that when a base language model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zayne Sprague , Jack Lu , Manya Wadhwa , Sedrick Keh , Mengye Ren , Greg Durrett

Distillation addresses the slow sampling problem in diffusion models by creating models with smaller size or fewer steps that approximate the behavior of high-step teachers. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Amirhossein Tighkhorshid , Zahra Dehghanian , Gholamali Aminian , Chengchun Shi , Hamid R. Rabiee

Can post-trained large language models (LLMs) further improve themselves using only unlabeled prompts, without external teachers or feedback from tools? We study this setting starting only from unlabeled seed questions with no ground-truth…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tony Lee , Percy Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has recently catalyzed a wave of "MLLM-r1" approaches that bring RL to vision language models. Most representative paradigms begin with a cold start, typically employing supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Kun Chen , Peng Shi , Haibo Qiu , Zhixiong Zeng , Siqi Yang , Wenji Mao , Lin Ma

Recent Large Reasoning Models trained via reinforcement learning exhibit a "natural" alignment with human cognitive costs. However, we show that the prevailing paradigm of reasoning distillation -- training student models to mimic these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yueqing Hu , Xinyang Peng , Shuting Peng , Hanqi Wang , Tianhong Wang

On-policy distillation is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xin Yu , Liuchen Liao , Yiwen Zhang , Yingchen Yu , Lingzhou Xue , Qinzhen Guo

With the rise of powerful closed-sourced LLMs (ChatGPT, GPT-4), there are increasing interests in distilling the capabilies of close-sourced LLMs to smaller open-sourced LLMs. Previous distillation methods usually prompt ChatGPT to generate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Hailin Chen , Amrita Saha , Steven Hoi , Shafiq Joty