English
Related papers

Related papers: Self-Distilled RLVR

200 papers

On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yaxuan Li , Yuxin Zuo , Bingxiang He , Jinqian Zhang , Chaojun Xiao , Cheng Qian , Tianyu Yu , Huan-ang Gao , Wenkai Yang , Zhiyuan Liu , Ning Ding

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

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 (OPD) has emerged as a dominant post-training paradigm for large language models, especially for reasoning domains. However, OPD remains unstable in practice due to the high gradient variance of its single-sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Minjae Oh , Sangjun Song , Gyubin Choi , Yunho Choi , Yohan Jo

Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome…

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts using dense feedback from a stronger teacher. Prior literature suggests that, provided teacher feedback is available, supervising the full sequence of response tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Kaiyuan Liu , Ziyuan Zhuang , Yang Bai , Bing Wang , Rongxiang Weng , Jieping Ye

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

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

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to continuously improve from environmental interactions is a central challenge in post-training. While on-policy self-distillation offers a promising paradigm, existing methods predominantly treat…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yuwei Zhang , Sha Li , Changlong Yu , Qin Lu , Shuowei Jin , Chengyu Dong , Haoran Liu , Ilgee Hong , Xintong Li , Zhenyu Shi , Bing Yin , Jingbo Shang

On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiazhen Huang , Xiao Chen , Xiao Luo , Yong Dai , Senkang Hu , Yuzhi Zhao

Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Walid Bousselham , Hilde Kuehne , Cordelia Schmid

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to find a policy that achieves high rewards while satisfying cost constraints. When learning from scratch, safe RL agents tend to be overly conservative, which impedes exploration and restrains the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Jinning Li , Xinyi Liu , Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Chen Tang , Wei Zhan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Jongwoo Ko , Sara Abdali , Young Jin Kim , Tianyi Chen , Pashmina Cameron

Knowledge distillation conducts an effective model compression method while holding some limitations:(1) the feature based distillation methods only focus on distilling the feature map but are lack of transferring the relation of data…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Muzhou Yu , Sia Huat Tan , Kailu Wu , Runpei Dong , Linfeng Zhang , Kaisheng Ma

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an effective post-training paradigm for large language models but requires a live teacher server throughout training, resulting in substantial infrastructure overhead. We investigate whether OPD can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yecheng Wu , Song Han , Hai Cai

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn effective policies from a static dataset without requiring further agent-environment interactions. However, its practical adoption is often hindered by the need for explicit reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera

Policy distillation, which transfers a teacher policy to a student policy has achieved great success in challenging tasks of deep reinforcement learning. This teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Kwei-Herng Lai , Daochen Zha , Yuening Li , Xia Hu