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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

Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive LLMs, offering competitive performance while supporting unique generation capabilities such as inpainting. We explore how inpainting can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Siyan Zhao , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Miao Liu , Chenyu Wang , Bo Liu , Yuandong Tian , Guan Pang , Sean Bell , Aditya Grover , Feiyu Chen

On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution. A design choice shared by nearly all such methods,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zihao Han , Tiangang Zhang , Huaibin Wang , Yilun Sun

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

Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siyan Zhao , Zhihui Xie , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Guan Pang , Feiyu Chen , Aditya Grover

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zehao Liu , Yuanpu Cao , Jinghui Chen , Vasant G. Honavar

Can post-trained large language models (LLMs) further improve themselves using only unlabeled prompts, without external teachers or feedback from tools? We study this setting starting only from unlabeled seed questions with no ground-truth…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tony Lee , Percy Liang

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

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

Language models rely on semantic priors to perform in-context learning, which leads to poor performance on tasks involving inductive reasoning. Instruction-tuning methods based on imitation learning can superficially enhance the in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Nafis Sadeq , Xin Xu , Zhouhang Xie , Julian McAuley , Byungkyu Kang , Prarit Lamba , Xiang Gao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fan Yang , Rui Meng , Trudi Di Qi , Ali Ezzati , Yuxin Wen

On-policy self-distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training language models, in which the model conditions on environment feedback to serve as its own teacher, providing dense token-level rewards without external…

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success across diverse tasks, and fine-tuning is sometimes needed to further enhance generation quality. Most existing methods rely on human supervision or parameter retraining, both of which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhen-Yu Zhang , Jiandong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimization. While existing methods often rely on expensive human…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Chris Samarinas , Hamed Zamani

Large language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning face a fundamental challenge: on problems the model cannot solve at all - "cliff" prompts - the RL gradient vanishes entirely, preventing any learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Ken Ding

Injecting new reasoning knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) via post-training often induces catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies emphasize the importance of on-policy data but suggest that KL-divergence fails to mitigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Wenye Lin , Kai Han

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but this ability is not equally accessible across languages. Especially low-resource languages exhibit much lower reasoning performance. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Michael A. Hedderich , Hinrich Schütze
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