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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)…

Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring knowledge from large language models to smaller student models; however, conventional supervised KD often suffers from a distribution mismatch between training and…

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…

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise,…

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…

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Consistency distillation is a prevalent way for accelerating diffusion models adopted in consistency (trajectory) models, in which a student model is trained to traverse backward on the probability flow (PF) ordinary differential equation…

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses large language models (LLMs) by transferring the teacher model's capabilities to a smaller student model, reducing inference cost and memory usage while maintaining performance. However, existing KD…

The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression method that can transfer the internal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones. However, the multi-modal probability distribution predicted by teacher LLMs…

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been recognized as an effective tool to compress and accelerate models. However, current KD approaches generally suffer from an accuracy drop and/or an excruciatingly long distillation process. In this paper,…

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,…

Consistency distillation methods have demonstrated significant success in accelerating generative tasks of diffusion models. However, since previous consistency distillation methods use simple and straightforward strategies in selecting…

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

On-policy distillation has recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard sequence-level imitation, training a student by scoring its own rollouts with a teacher model. However, we observe ``Off-policy Teacher Decay'' problem in…

Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) provides dense token-level credit assignment for reinforcement learning with large language models by leveraging the model's own feedback-conditioned predictions as a self-teacher. Unlike GRPO,…

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is increasingly adopted to transfer capabilities from large language models to smaller ones, offering significant improvements in efficiency and utility while often surpassing standard fine-tuning. Beyond…

Recent work has focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT where the major focus has been to improve the in-distribution performance for downstream tasks. However, very few of these studies have analyzed the impact…