Related papers: KL for a KL: On-Policy Distillation with Control V…

On-policy distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

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…

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…

Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

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…

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.…

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…

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own rollouts using a privileged teacher, but its standard objective weights all generated tokens equally, implicitly treating the privileged teacher target as equally reliable at…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Context distillation enables language models to internalize in-context knowledge into their parameters. In our work, we propose On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a framework that bridges on-policy distillation with context distillation…

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…

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…

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…

On-policy distillation (OPD) is widely used for LLM post-training. When pushed with a reward-extrapolation coefficient lambda > 1, the student can lift past the teacher in domain, but past a threshold lambda* the same step violates the…

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,…

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…

LLM-based generation of SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) is often reported as nearing saturation, with the strongest specialized model reaching ${\sim}76\%$ accuracy on NL2SVA-Human. We show that this aggregate hides a temporal gap: models…