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On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by providing dense token-level supervision for on-policy rollouts. However, existing OPSD methods often yield limited gains on in-domain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ziqi Zhao , Xinyu Ma , Liu Yang , Yujie Feng , Daiting Shi , Jingzhou He , Xin Xin , Zhaochun Ren , Xiao-Ming Wu

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own rollouts using a privileged teacher, but its standard objective weights all generated tokens equally, implicitly treating the privileged teacher target as equally reliable at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xiaogeng Liu , Xinyan Wang , Yingzi Ma , Yechao Zhang , Chaowei Xiao

On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution. A design choice shared by nearly all such methods,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zihao Han , Tiangang Zhang , Huaibin Wang , Yilun Sun

Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Emiliano Penaloza , Dheeraj Vattikonda , Nicolas Gontier , Alexandre Lacoste , Laurent Charlin , Massimo Caccia

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Miao Rang , Zhenni Bi , Hang Zhou , Kai Han , Xuechun Wang , An Xiao , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang , Hanting Chen

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

On-policy knowledge distillation has proven effective for language models, yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We observe that standard on-policy distillation can improve a student's output quality…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Ruiqi Liu , Xiaolei Lv , Gengsheng Li , Ximo Zhu , Zhiheng Wang , Zhengbo Zhang , Junkai Chen , Zhiheng Li , Bo Li , Jun Gao , Shu Wu

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee

Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency, but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xianwei Chen , Shimin Zhang , Jibin Wu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Qianhao Yuan , Jie Lou , Xing Yu , Hongyu Lin , Le Sun , Xianpei Han , Yaojie Lu

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xinqiang Yu , Chuanguang Yang , Chengqing Yu , Libo Huang , Zhulin An , Yongjun Xu

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to proprietary and domain-specific corpora that contain sensitive information, creating a tension between formal privacy guarantees and efficient deployment through model compression.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Fatemeh Khadem , Sajad Mousavi , Yi Fang , Yuhong Liu

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fan Yang , Rui Meng , Trudi Di Qi , Ali Ezzati , Yuxin Wen

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

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

Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yanfei Zhang , Xu Lin , Chenglin Wu