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Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

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

In many practical applications, large language models (LLMs) need to acquire new knowledge not present in their pre-training data. Efficiently leveraging this knowledge usually relies on supervised fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Kalle Kujanpää , Pekka Marttinen , Harri Valpola , Alexander Ilin

To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Yuntian Deng , Kiran Prasad , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Vishrav Chaudhary , Stuart Shieber

Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used for compressing a teacher model to a smaller student model, reducing its inference cost and memory footprint while preserving model capabilities. However, current KD methods for auto-regressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jongwoo Ko , Sungnyun Kim , Tianyi Chen , Se-Young Yun

Model distillation is a fundamental technique in building large language models (LLMs), transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. However, distillation can lead to model homogenization, reducing diversity among models…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by providing dense token-level supervision for on-policy rollouts. However, existing OPSD methods often yield limited gains on in-domain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ziqi Zhao , Xinyu Ma , Liu Yang , Yujie Feng , Daiting Shi , Jingzhou He , Xin Xin , Zhaochun Ren , Xiao-Ming Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods replaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiaohang Tang , Keyue Jiang , Che Liu , Qifang Zhao , Xiaoxiao Xu , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

We propose a resource-efficient framework for compressing large language models through knowledge distillation, combined with guided chain-of-thought reinforcement learning. Using Qwen 3B as the teacher and Qwen 0.5B as the student, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Alejandro Paredes La Torre , Barbara Flores , Diego Rodriguez

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but this ability is not equally accessible across languages. Especially low-resource languages exhibit much lower reasoning performance. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Michael A. Hedderich , Hinrich Schütze

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced reasoning at larger scales, driving efforts to distill these capabilities into smaller models via teacher-student learning. Previous works simply fine-tune student models on teachers' generated…

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

This paper proposes the DistillCSE framework, which performs contrastive learning under the self-training paradigm with knowledge distillation. The potential advantage of DistillCSE is its self-enhancing feature: using a base model to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Jiahao Xu , Wei Shao , Lihui Chen , Lemao Liu

Knowledge distillation offers a transformative pathway to developing powerful, yet efficient, small language models (SLMs) suitable for resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we benchmark the performance and computational cost of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Sachin Gopal Wani , Eric Page , Ajay Dholakia , David Ellison

Over the past year, the emergence of transfer learning with large-scale language models (LM) has led to dramatic performance improvements across a broad range of natural language understanding tasks. However, the size and memory footprint…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Luke Melas-Kyriazi , George Han , Celine Liang

Mitigating the retention of sensitive or private information in large language models is essential for enhancing privacy and safety. Existing unlearning methods, like Gradient Ascent and Negative Preference Optimization, directly tune…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yijiang River Dong , Hongzhou Lin , Mikhail Belkin , Ramon Huerta , Ivan Vulić

While chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation from advanced large language models (LLMs) has proven effective in general reasoning tasks, it struggles in scientific domains where even advanced models often produce incorrect or superficial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Kehua Feng , Keyan Ding , Zhihui Zhu , Lei Liang , Qiang Zhang , Huajun Chen

This paper introduces a novel approach for efficiently distilling LLMs into smaller, application-specific models, significantly reducing operational costs and manual labor. Addressing the challenge of deploying computationally intensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Lukas Vöge , Vincent Gurgul , Stefan Lessmann

It has been recently demonstrated that multi-generational self-distillation can improve generalization. Despite this intriguing observation, reasons for the enhancement remain poorly understood. In this paper, we first demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Zhilu Zhang , Mert R. Sabuncu

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

The deployment and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. Traditional distillation methods, which transfer the capabilities of LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Yifei Zhang , Bo Pan , Chen Ling , Yuntong Hu , Liang Zhao