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Related papers: On-Policy Context Distillation for Language Models

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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

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,…

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

Knowledge distillation addresses the problem of transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. In this process, we typically have multiple types of knowledge extracted from the teacher model. The problem is to make full use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Chenglong Wang , Yi Lu , Yongyu Mu , Yimin Hu , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

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

The advent of contextual word embeddings -- representations of words which incorporate semantic and syntactic information from their context -- has led to tremendous improvements on a wide variety of NLP tasks. However, recent contextual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Prakhar Gupta , Martin Jaggi

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to reduce its inference cost and memory footprint, by training a smaller student model. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive sequence models suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Rishabh Agarwal , Nino Vieillard , Yongchao Zhou , Piotr Stanczyk , Sabela Ramos , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Bachem

Post-training endows pretrained LLMs with a variety of desirable skills, including instruction-following, reasoning, and others. However, these post-trained LLMs only encode knowledge up to a cut-off date, necessitating continual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Shankar Padmanabhan , Mustafa Omer Gul , Tanya Goyal

Diffusion models generate high-quality images through progressive denoising but are computationally intensive due to large model sizes and repeated sampling. Knowledge distillation, which transfers knowledge from a complex teacher to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Dohyun Kim , Sehwan Park , Geonhee Han , Seung Wook Kim , Paul Hongsuck Seo

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning. However, we find that its standard advantage weighted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Nan Jia , Haojin Yang , Xing Ma , Jiesong Lian , Shuailiang Zhang , Weipeng Zhang , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai , Zequn Sun

On-policy distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yifan Song , Minrui Xu , Yongxin Wang , Yiwei Wang , Xiaodan Liang , Jing Tang

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dengyang Jiang , Xin Jin , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Mingzhe Zheng , Ruoyi Du , Xiangpeng Yang , Qilong Wu , Zhen Li , Peng Gao , Harry Yang , Steven Hoi

Knowledge distillation aims to compress a powerful yet cumbersome teacher model into a lightweight student model without much sacrifice of performance. For this purpose, various approaches have been proposed over the past few years,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Defang Chen , Jian-Ping Mei , Hailin Zhang , Can Wang , Yan Feng , Chun Chen

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

This paper studies the problem of pre-training for small models, which is essential for many mobile devices. Current state-of-the-art methods on this problem transfer the representational knowledge of a large network (as a Teacher) into a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Mingsheng Li , Lin Zhang , Mingzhen Zhu , Zilong Huang , Gang Yu , Jiayuan Fan , Tao Chen

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique that compresses large teacher models by training smaller student models to mimic them. The success of KD in auto-regressive language models mainly relies on Reverse KL for mode-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jun Rao , Xuebo Liu , Zepeng Lin , Liang Ding , Jing Li , Dacheng Tao , Min Zhang

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

Recent work has shown that augmenting environments with language descriptions improves policy learning. However, for environments with complex language abstractions, learning how to ground language to observations is difficult due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Victor Zhong , Jesse Mu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a promising technique for addressing the computational challenges associated with deploying large-scale recommender systems. KD transfers the knowledge of a massive teacher system to a compact…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Gyuseok Lee , SeongKu Kang , Wonbin Kweon , Hwanjo Yu

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