Related papers: Surgical Post-Training: Proximal On-Policy Distill…

On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence,…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of pre-trained knowledge in their parameters, but updating them as real-world information evolves remains a challenge. Existing methodologies and benchmarks primarily target entity…

The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing large language models (LLMs). Recent Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) estimates advantages using multiple on-policy outputs per prompt, leading to high computational costs and low…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training methods. While longer reasoning traces can improve…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities when trained with chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision. However, the long and verbose CoT traces, especially those distilled from large reasoning models (LRMs) such as…

To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have…

Reinforcement learning has been central to recent advances in large language model reasoning, but most algorithms rely on on-policy training that demands fresh rollouts at every update, limiting efficiency and scalability. Asynchronous RL…

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has gained wide attraction as an LLM post-training paradigm due to its effectiveness in improving capabilities without introducing model distribution drift, and consequently, regression in general tasks.…

Two major sources of training data exist for post-training modern language models: online (model-generated rollouts) data, and offline (human or other-model demonstrations) data. These two types of data are typically used by approaches like…

While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

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…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is essential for training non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models by reducing the complexity of the raw data with an autoregressive teacher model. In this study, we empirically show that as a side effect of…

Textual representation learners trained on large amounts of data have achieved notable success on downstream tasks; intriguingly, they have also performed well on challenging tests of syntactic competence. Given this success, it remains an…

Policy optimization (PO) algorithms are used to refine Large Language Models for complex, multi-step reasoning. Current state-of-the-art pipelines enforce a strict think-then-answer format to elicit chain-of-thought (CoT); however, the…

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and related pre-trained Transformers have provided large gains across many language understanding tasks, achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). BERT is pre-trained on two…

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods widely used for language model post-training, like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), often suffer from limited exploration and early saturation due to low sampling diversity. While…

Small Vision Language Models (SVLMs) generally refer to models with parameter sizes less than or equal to 2B. Their low cost and power consumption characteristics confer high commercial value. However, their reasoning abilities are limited…