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Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human preference annotations, distilling preferences from generative LLMs has emerged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hongli Zhou , Hui Huang , Wei Liu , Chenglong Wang , Xingyuan Bu , Lvyuan Han , Fuhai Song , Muyun Yang , Wenhao Jiang , Hailong Cao , Tiejun Zhao

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

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jiequan Cui , Beier Zhu , Qingshan Xu , Zhuotao Tian , Xiaojuan Qi , Bei Yu , Hanwang Zhang , Richang Hong

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) bring powerful understanding and reasoning capabilities to multimodal tasks. Meanwhile, the great need for capable aritificial intelligence on mobile devices also arises, such as the AI assistant software. Some…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Qianhan Feng , Wenshuo Li , Tong Lin , Xinghao Chen

Knowledge distillation plays a key role in compressing the Large Language Models (LLMs), which boosts a small-size student model under large teacher models' guidance. However, existing LLM distillation methods overly rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Xiaoyu Liu , Yun Zhang , Wei Li , Simiao Li , Xudong Huang , Hanting Chen , Yehui Tang , Jie Hu , Zhiwei Xiong , Yunhe Wang

Standard Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing final outputs, yet it typically treats the teacher's intermediate layer's thought process as a black box. While feature-based distillation attempts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manish Dhakal , Uthman Jinadu , Anjila Budathoki , Rajshekhar Sunderraman , Yi Ding

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for energy-efficient and biologically plausible computation. However, due to limitations in existing training methods and inherent model constraints, SNNs often exhibit a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Tianqing Zhang , Zixin Zhu , Kairong Yu , Hongwei Wang

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet their vast parameter sizes restrict their applicability in resource-constrained settings. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a viable solution by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Rongzhi Zhang , Jiaming Shen , Tianqi Liu , Haorui Wang , Zhen Qin , Feng Han , Jialu Liu , Simon Baumgartner , Michael Bendersky , Chao Zhang

Knowledge Distillation (KD) for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important as models grow in size and complexity. While existing distillation approaches focus on imitating teacher behavior, they often overlook the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan

Self-distillation has emerged as a powerful framework for post-training LLMs, where a teacher conditioned on extra information guides a student without it, both from the same model. While this guidance is useful when the student has failed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jeonghye Kim , Jiwon Jeon , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hongling Xu , Qi Zhu , Heyuan Deng , Jinpeng Li , Lu Hou , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Ruifeng Xu , Fei Mi

Several scalable sample-based methods to compute the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions have been proposed and applied in large-scale machine learning models. While they have been found to be unstable, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Sandesh Ghimire , Prashnna K Gyawali , Linwei Wang

Recent research on knowledge distillation has increasingly focused on logit distillation because of its simplicity, effectiveness, and versatility in model compression. In this paper, we introduce Refined Logit Distillation (RLD) to address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Wujie Sun , Defang Chen , Siwei Lyu , Genlang Chen , Chun Chen , Can Wang

This study presents our submission to the Strict-Small Track of the 2nd BabyLM Challenge. We use a teacher-student distillation setup with the BabyLLaMa model (Timiryasov and Tastet, 2023) as a backbone. To make the student's learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Shaozhen Shi , Yevgen Matusevych , Malvina Nissim

Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

Knowledge distillation has been widely adopted in computer vision task processing, since it can effectively enhance the performance of lightweight student networks by leveraging the knowledge transferred from cumbersome teacher networks.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yafei Qi , Chen Wang , Zhaoning Zhang , Yaping Liu , Yongmin Zhang

The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involves a regularization term, which is the reverse…

Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jingchen Sun , Shaobo Han , Deep Patel , Wataru Kohno , Can Jin , Changyou Chen