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Causal language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their size poses significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation, a widely-used technique for transferring knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Makoto Shing , Kou Misaki , Han Bao , Sho Yokoi , Takuya Akiba

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

GRPO-style RLVR trains reasoning models from multiple on-policy attempts per prompt, but typically uses these attempts only through terminal rewards. We show that a mixed group contains a richer process signal: a correct completion is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhiquan Tan , Yinrong Hong

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 distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yuanyi Wang , Su Lu , Yanggan Gu , Pengkai Wang , Yifan Yang , Zhaoyi Yan , Congkai Xie , Jianmin Wu , Hongxia Yang

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) is a unified learning framework in which a single large language model acts simultaneously as both teacher and student. Unlike conventional knowledge distillation that relies on a separate, often larger…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Fangming Cui , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li

On-policy distillation (OPD), which supervises a student on its own sampled trajectories, has emerged as a data-efficient post-training method for improving reasoning while avoiding the reward dependence of reinforcement learning and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ke Zhang , Yunjie Tian , Dongdi Zhao , Yijiang Li , Yuanye Liu , Vishal M Patel , Di Fu

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student models under their own induced distribution while leveraging supervision from stronger teachers. We identify a failure mode of OPD: as training progresses, on-policy rollouts can undergo abrupt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Feng Luo , Yu-Neng Chuang , Guanchu Wang , Zicheng Xu , Xiaotian Han , Tianyi Zhang , Vladimir Braverman

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a popular training paradigm in the LLM community. This paradigm selects a larger model as the teacher to provide dense, fine-grained signals for each sampled trajectory, in contrast to reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Chenxu Yang , Chuanyu Qin , Qingyi Si , Minghui Chen , Naibin Gu , Dingyu Yao , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang , Jiaqi Wang , Nan Duan

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jianzhi Yan , Le Liu , Youcheng Pan , Shiwei Chen , Yang Xiang , Buzhou Tang

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a standard tool for transferring teacher behavior to a smaller student, but it implicitly assumes that teacher and student predictions are comparable token by token, an assumption that fails whenever the two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jie Sun , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Qiyong Zhong , Yilin Cheng , Bichuan Feng , Pengfei Liu , Junfeng Fang , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive tasks, but its sample efficiency is severely limited by sparse rewards and long horizons. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) alleviates this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Wang , Guozhi Wang , Han Xiao , Yufeng Zhou , Yue Pan , Jichao Wang , Ke Xu , Yafei Wen , Xiaohu Ruan , Xiaoxin Chen , Honggang Qi

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

The significant computational demands of large language models have increased interest in distilling reasoning abilities into smaller models via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation. Current CoT distillation methods mainly focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yao Chen , Jiawei Sheng , Wenyuan Zhang , Tingwen Liu

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model. Despite its empirical success, the conditions under which…

Layer-wise distillation is a powerful tool to compress large models (i.e. teacher models) into small ones (i.e., student models). The student distills knowledge from the teacher by mimicking the hidden representations of the teacher at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Chen Liang , Simiao Zuo , Qingru Zhang , Pengcheng He , Weizhu Chen , Tuo Zhao

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

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao