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Diffusion models are central to modern generative modeling, and understanding how they balance memorization and generalization is critical for reliable deployment. Recent work has shown that memorization in diffusion models is shaped by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Bingqing Jiang , Difan Zou

Decision transformer based sequential policies have emerged as a powerful paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL), yet their efficacy remains constrained by the quality of static datasets and inherent architectural limitations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yihao Qin , Yuanfei Wang , Hang Zhou , Peiran Liu , Hao Dong , Yiding Ji

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

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

Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yumeng Zhang , Zhengbang Yang , Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake , Zhuangdi Zhu

Recent advances in knowledge distillation (KD) have enabled smaller student models to approach the performance of larger teacher models. However, popular methods such as supervised KD and on-policy KD, are adversely impacted by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Wenda Xu , Rujun Han , Zifeng Wang , Long T. Le , Dhruv Madeka , Lei Li , William Yang Wang , Rishabh Agarwal , Chen-Yu Lee , Tomas Pfister

Inference-time harnesses substantially improve large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, the intrinsic capabilities of the underlying model remain unchanged by the addition of these external workflows. To bridge this gap,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhengyang Zhao , Lu Ma , Wentao Zhang

Knowledge distillation is a key technique for transferring the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Existing distillation approaches often overlook two critical factors: the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jincheng Cao , Fanzhi Zeng , Leqi Liu , Aryan Mokhtari

Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Emiliano Penaloza , Dheeraj Vattikonda , Nicolas Gontier , Alexandre Lacoste , Laurent Charlin , Massimo Caccia

Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models. While on-policy reinforcement learning can reduce forgetting, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Idan Shenfeld , Mehul Damani , Jonas Hübotter , Pulkit Agrawal

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains challenging for deep learning models, particularly when test-time OOD samples differ significantly from training outliers. We propose OODD, a novel test-time OOD detection method that dynamically…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yifeng Yang , Lin Zhu , Zewen Sun , Hengyu Liu , Qinying Gu , Nanyang Ye

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xinsen Zhang , Zhenkai Ding , Tianjun Pan , Run Yang , Chun Kang , Xue Xiong , Jingnan Gu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Qianhao Yuan , Jie Lou , Xing Yu , Hongyu Lin , Le Sun , Xianpei Han , Yaojie Lu

Sequence-level knowledge distillation (SLKD) is a model compression technique that leverages large, accurate teacher models to train smaller, under-parameterized student models. Why does pre-processing MT data with SLKD help us train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Mitchell A. Gordon , Kevin Duh

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Claas A Voelcker , Marcel Hussing , Eric Eaton , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Igor Gilitschenski

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

Offline Behavior Distillation (OBD), which condenses massive offline RL data into a compact synthetic behavioral dataset, offers a promising approach for efficient policy training and can be applied across various downstream RL tasks. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Shiye Lei , Zhihao Cheng , Dacheng Tao

On-policy knowledge distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts under token-level supervision from a teacher. Not all token positions matter equally, but existing views of token importance are incomplete. We ask a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuanda Xu , Hejian Sang , Zhengze Zhou , Ran He , Zhipeng Wang , Alborz Geramifard

Black-box knowledge distillation for large language models presents a strict trade-off. Simple off-policy methods (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation) struggle to correct the student's inherent errors. Fully on-policy methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Xiwen Chen , Jingjing Wang , Wenhui Zhu , Peijie Qiu , Xuanzhao Dong , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Alborz Geramifard , Feng Luo