Related papers: Why Does Self-Distillation (Sometimes) Degrade the…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large language models into smaller ones while preserving performance. Despite the recent traction of KD research, its effectiveness for smaller language models (LMs) and the…

Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Transferring the reasoning capability from stronger large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones has been quite appealing, as smaller LLMs are more flexible to deploy with less expense. Among the existing solutions, knowledge distillation…

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in recent natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their deployment poses substantial challenges due to high computational and memory demands in real-world…

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…

Distilling the thinking traces of a Large Language Model (LLM) with reasoning capabilities into a smaller model has been proven effective. Yet, there is a scarcity of work done on how model performances scale with the quantity of…

Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling the knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one. As a critical issue facing LM distillation, a superior student often arises from a teacher of a relatively small scale instead…

Knowledge distillation optimises a smaller student model to behave similarly to a larger teacher model, retaining some of the performance benefits. While this method can improve results on in-distribution examples, it does not necessarily…

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…

On-policy distillation is pivotal for transferring reasoning capabilities to capacity-constrained models, yet remains prone to instability and negative transfer. We show that on-policy distillation can be interpreted, both theoretically and…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

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…

Reasoning-capable language models achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse complex tasks by generating long, explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. While recent works show that base models can acquire such reasoning traces via…

We study the source of uncertainty in DeepSeek R1-32B by analyzing its self-reported verbal confidence on question answering (QA) tasks. In the default answer-then-confidence setting, the model is regularly over-confident, whereas semantic…

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…

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality…

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where…

Knowledge distillation is a widely adopted technique for transferring capabilities from LLMs to smaller, more efficient student models. However, unauthorized use of knowledge distillation takes unfair advantage of the considerable effort…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing. However, the massive scale and computational demands of these models present formidable challenges when considering their practical…

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in customer support is constrained by hallucination (generating false information) and the high cost of proprietary models. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented…