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Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tommy He , Jerome Sieber , Matteo Saponati

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Zhang , Xiangyu Peng , Qinglin Chen , Qinyuan Ye , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

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…

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

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

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

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

Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Han Yang , Mingyan Wu , Bailan He , Zeyu Cao , Sikuan Yan , Kevin Qinghong Lin , Zifeng Ding

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haodi Lei , Yafy Li , Haoran Zhang , Shunkai Zhang , Qianjia Cheng , Xiaoye Qu , Ganqu Cui , Bowen Zhou , Ning Ding , Yun Luo , Yu Cheng

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qiyong Zhong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Xin Lin , Jie Sun , Houcheng Jiang , Xiang Wang , Junfeng Fang

Advanced reasoning typically requires Chain-of-Thought prompting, which is accurate but incurs prohibitive latency and substantial test-time inference costs. The standard alternative, fine-tuning smaller models, often sacrifices…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Sanket Badhe , Deep Shah

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

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

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 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

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

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao

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,…

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