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Related papers: Retrieval-Feedback-Driven Distillation and Prefere…

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Large neural models (such as Transformers) achieve state-of-the-art performance for information retrieval (IR). In this paper, we aim to improve distillation methods that pave the way for the resource-efficient deployment of such models in…

This paper addresses the challenges of high computational cost and slow inference in deploying large language models. It proposes a distillation strategy guided by multiple teacher models. The method constructs several teacher models and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Xiandong Meng , Yan Wu , Yexin Tian , Xin Hu , Tianze Kang , Junliang Du

R1-style Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet the mechanism behind rule-based RL remains unclear. We found that small-scale SFT has substantial influence on RL but shows poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Yutong Chen , Jiandong Gao , Ji Wu

While the current state-of-the-art dense retrieval models exhibit strong out-of-domain generalization, they might fail to capture nuanced domain-specific knowledge. In principle, fine-tuning these models for specialized retrieval tasks…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Manveer Singh Tamber , Suleman Kazi , Vivek Sourabh , Jimmy Lin

Retrieval-augmented generation framework can address the limitations of large language models by enabling real-time knowledge updates for more accurate answers. An efficient way in the training phase of retrieval-augmented models is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zizhong Li , Haopeng Zhang , Jiawei Zhang

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved strong results in text generation. However, their multi-step sampling leads to slow inference, limiting practical use. To address this, we extend Inverse Distillation, a technique…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 David Li , Nikita Gushchin , Dmitry Abulkhanov , Eric Moulines , Ivan Oseledets , Maxim Panov , Alexander Korotin

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Linqian Fan , Peiqin Sun , Tiancheng Wen , Shun Lu , Chengru Song

Knowledge distillation is an effective way to transfer knowledge from a strong teacher to an efficient student model. Ideally, we expect the better the teacher is, the better the student. However, this expectation does not always come true.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Zhenghao Lin , Yeyun Gong , Xiao Liu , Hang Zhang , Chen Lin , Anlei Dong , Jian Jiao , Jingwen Lu , Daxin Jiang , Rangan Majumder , Nan Duan

Aligning small language models (SLMs) with human values typically involves distilling preference knowledge from large language models (LLMs). However, existing distillation methods model preference knowledge in teacher LLMs by comparing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yanggan Gu , Junzhuo Li , Sirui Huang , Xin Zou , Zhenghua Li , Xuming Hu

In the field of large language models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a critical technique for transferring capabilities from teacher models to student models. However, existing KD methods face limitations and challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yixing Li , Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Dequan Wang , Yu Cheng , Furu Wei

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Linwei Dong , Ruoyu Guo , Ge Bai , Zehuan Yuan , Yawei Luo , Changqing Zou

Recent studies have demonstrated the great potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) serving as zero-shot relevance rankers. The typical approach involves making comparisons between pairs or lists of documents. Although effective, these…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Weiwei Sun , Zheng Chen , Xinyu Ma , Lingyong Yan , Shuaiqiang Wang , Pengjie Ren , Zhumin Chen , Dawei Yin , Zhaochun Ren

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various applications, but their conversational abilities decline sharply as model size decreases, presenting a barrier to their deployment in resource-constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Zhengze Zhang , Shiqi Wang , Yiqun Shen , Simin Guo , Dahua Lin , Xiaoliang Wang , Nguyen Cam-Tu , Fei Tan

This work studies knowledge distillation (KD) for large language models (LLMs) through preference optimization. We propose a reward-guided imitation learning framework for sequential KD, formulating a min-max optimization problem between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chen Jia

Despite the success of distillation in large language models (LLMs), most prior work applies identical loss functions to both teacher- and student-generated data. These strategies overlook the synergy between loss formulations and data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jongwoo Ko , Tianyi Chen , Sungnyun Kim , Tianyu Ding , Luming Liang , Ilya Zharkov , Se-Young Yun

Large recommendation models have demonstrated substantial potential gains under scaling laws, yet these gains are difficult to realize in industrial recommendation systems because real-world deployment requires lightweight models with…

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

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Woogyeol Jin , Taywon Min , Yongjin Yang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Dennis Wei , Nathalie Baracaldo , Kimin Lee