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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

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Zhang , Xiangyu Peng , Qinglin Chen , Qinyuan Ye , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse domains, yet their enormous computational and memory requirements hinder deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation offers a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hao Zhang , Zhibin Zhang , Guangxin Wu , Wanyi Ning , Jiafeng Guo , Xueqi Cheng

Knowledge Distillation (KD) can transfer the reasoning abilities of large models to smaller ones, which can reduce the costs to generate Chain-of-Thoughts for reasoning tasks. KD methods typically ask the student to mimic the teacher's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Minsang Kim , Seung Jun Baek

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

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qiyong Zhong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Xin Lin , Jie Sun , Houcheng Jiang , Xiang Wang , Junfeng Fang

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

Reinforcement-learning-based post-training has become a key approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but its token-level learning signals remain poorly understood. This work studies their heterogeneity through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gengyang Li , Zheng-Fan Wu , Siqi Bao , Yunfang Wu

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guobin Shen , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Lei Huang , Jindong Li , Dongcheng Zhao , Xing Yu

Although deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) have achieved excellent performance in human pose estimation, these networks often have a large number of parameters and computations, leading to the slow inference speed. For this issue, an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Zhong-Qiu Zhao , Yao Gao , Yuchen Ge , Weidong Tian

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,…

Distillation is an effective knowledge-transfer technique that uses predicted distributions of a powerful teacher model as soft targets to train a less-parameterized student model. A pre-trained high capacity teacher, however, is not always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Defang Chen , Jian-Ping Mei , Can Wang , Yan Feng , Chun Chen

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

On-policy distillation is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xin Yu , Liuchen Liao , Yiwen Zhang , Yingchen Yu , Lingzhou Xue , Qinzhen Guo

The knowledge distillation uses a high-performance teacher network to guide the student network. However, the performance gap between the teacher and student networks can affect the student's training. This paper proposes a novel knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Songling Zhu , Ronghua Shang , Bo Yuan , Weitong Zhang , Yangyang Li , Licheng Jiao

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

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yanfei Zhang , Xu Lin , Chenglin Wu

On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers reasoning behavior by training a student on teacher feedback along student-generated trajectories, but standard full-rollout training ties every update to a costly completion and can over-allocate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kun Liang , Chenming Tang , Clive Bai , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

Growing efforts to improve knowledge distillation (KD) in large language models (LLMs) replace dense teacher supervision with selective distillation, which uses a subset of token positions, vocabulary classes, or training samples for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Almog Tavor , Itay Ebenspanger , Neil Cnaan , Mor Geva

Knowledge distillation, transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model, has emerged as a powerful technique in neural machine translation for compressing models or simplifying training targets. Knowledge distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Jingxuan Wei , Linzhuang Sun , Yichong Leng , Xu Tan , Bihui Yu , Ruifeng Guo