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Although pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit impressive generalization in robotic manipulation, post-training remains crucial to ensure reliable performance during deployment. However, standard offline Supervised…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhide Zhong , Haodong Yan , Junfeng Li , Junjie He , Tianran Zhang , Haoang Li

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

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)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxuan Jiang , Runchao Li , Shubhashis Roy Dipta , Dawei Li , Zhao Yang

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard route to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) into compact students, yet most pipelines uniformly apply token-wise loss regardless of teacher confidence. This indiscriminate supervision amplifies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Haiduo Huang , Jiangcheng Song , Yadong Zhang , Pengju Ren

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

On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used,…

Context distillation enables language models to internalize in-context knowledge into their parameters. In our work, we propose On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a framework that bridges on-policy distillation with context distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Miao Rang , Zhenni Bi , Hang Zhou , Kai Han , Xuechun Wang , An Xiao , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang , Hanting Chen

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive tasks, but its sample efficiency is severely limited by sparse rewards and long horizons. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) alleviates this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Wang , Guozhi Wang , Han Xiao , Yufeng Zhou , Yue Pan , Jichao Wang , Ke Xu , Yafei Wen , Xiaohu Ruan , Xiaoxin Chen , Honggang Qi

Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Han Yang , Mingyan Wu , Bailan He , Zeyu Cao , Sikuan Yan , Kevin Qinghong Lin , Zifeng Ding

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

Domain specialization can improve LLM behavior in vertical domains, but often weakens the general capabilities inherited from the original model. Recent Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) pipelines recover model capabilities by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tianlei Chen , Jiao Ou , Ziyuan Liu , Ruiming Tang , Jian Liang , Han Li

Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tommy He , Jerome Sieber , Matteo Saponati

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junlong Ke , Zichen Wen , Weijia Li , Conghui He , Linfeng Zhang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique that compresses large teacher models by training smaller student models to mimic them. The success of KD in auto-regressive language models mainly relies on Reverse KL for mode-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jun Rao , Xuebo Liu , Zepeng Lin , Liang Ding , Jing Li , Dacheng Tao , Min Zhang

Knowledge distillation is central to LLM post-training, yet its design space remains poorly understood, especially alongside reinforcement learning (RL). We show that the prevailing paradigms, off-policy distillation and on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Anhao Zhao , Haoran Xin , Yingqi Fan , Junlong Tong , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to proprietary and domain-specific corpora that contain sensitive information, creating a tension between formal privacy guarantees and efficient deployment through model compression.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Fatemeh Khadem , Sajad Mousavi , Yi Fang , Yuhong Liu