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Recent advances in large language model (LLM) post-training have leveraged two distinct paradigms to enhance reasoning capabilities: reinforcement learning (RL) and knowledge distillation (KD). While RL enables the emergence of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hongling Xu , Qi Zhu , Heyuan Deng , Jinpeng Li , Lu Hou , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Ruifeng Xu , Fei Mi

Reasoning over long sequences of observations and actions is essential for many robotic tasks. Yet, learning effective long-context policies from demonstrations remains challenging. As context length increases, training becomes increasingly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Marcel Torne , Andy Tang , Yuejiang Liu , Chelsea Finn

Large language models are expensive to deploy. We introduce Sparse Knowledge Distillation (SparseKD), a post-training method that compresses transformer models by combining structured SVD pruning with self-referential knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Aaron R. Flouro , Shawn P. Chadwick

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities, enabling increasingly complex tasks. However, these capabilities often diminish in smaller, more computationally efficient models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yong Zhang , Bingyuan Zhang , Zhitao Li , Ming Li , Ning Cheng , Minchuan Chen , Tao Wei , Jun Ma , Shaojun Wang , Jing Xiao

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

Large language model (LLM) based multi-turn dialogue systems often struggle to track dependencies across non-adjacent turns, undermining both consistency and scalability. As conversations lengthen, essential information becomes sparse and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Renning Pang , Tian Lan , Leyuan Liu , Xiaoming Huang , Piao Tong , Xiaosong Zhang

Large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 and their distilled variants achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, distilling these models often demands large-scale data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), motivating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Lechen Zhang , Yunxiang Zhang , Wei Hu , Lu Wang

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in world models, which primarily aim to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between an agent's actions and the evolving environment. However, existing approaches often suffer from tight…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Guangfeng Jiang , Yueru Luo , Jun Liu , Yi Huang , Yiyao Zhu , Zhan Qu , Dave Zhenyu Chen , Bingbing Liu , Xu Yan

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances formal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) by training them to explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps. While LLMs readily benefit from such techniques, improving…

Knowledge distillation can be a cost-effective technique to distill knowledge in Large Language Models, if the teacher output logits can be pre-computed and cached. However, successfully applying this to pre-training remains largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Anshumann , Mohd Abbas Zaidi , Akhil Kedia , Jinwoo Ahn , Taehwak Kwon , Kangwook Lee , Haejun Lee , Joohyung Lee

On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuqian Fu , Haohuan Huang , Kaiwen Jiang , Jiacai Liu , Zhuo Jiang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Somin Wadhwa , Silvio Amir , Byron C. Wallace

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Kairong Han , Wenshuo Zhao , Ziyu Zhao , JunJian Ye , Lujia Pan , Kun Kuang

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

Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yumeng Zhang , Zhengbang Yang , Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake , Zhuangdi Zhu

Self-supervised learning solves pretext prediction tasks that do not require annotations to learn feature representations. For vision tasks, pretext tasks such as predicting rotation, solving jigsaw are solely created from the input data.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Prashant Bhat , Elahe Arani , Bahram Zonooz

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in predicting mental health outcomes from online text, yet traditional classification methods often lack interpretability and robustness. This study evaluates structured reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Avinash Patil , Amardeep Kour Gedhu

Knowledge distillation, the technique of transferring knowledge from large, complex models to smaller ones, marks a pivotal step towards efficient AI deployment. Distilling Step-by-Step~(DSS), a novel method utilizing chain-of-thought~(CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xin Chen , Hanxian Huang , Yanjun Gao , Yi Wang , Jishen Zhao , Ke Ding

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Chengwei Dai , Kun Li , Wei Zhou , Songlin Hu