Related papers: Training with Harnesses: On-Policy Harness Self-Di…
Reasoning-oriented language models achieve strong performance by generating long chain-of-thought traces at inference time. However, this capability comes with substantial and often excessive computational cost, which can materialize in…
On-policy knowledge distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts under token-level supervision from a teacher. Not all token positions matter equally, but existing views of token importance are incomplete. We ask a direct…
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…
Self-distillation bootstraps large language models (LLMs) by training on their own generations. However, existing methods either rely on external signals to curate self-generated outputs (e.g., correctness filtering, execution feedback, and…
Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser…
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,…
Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading…
On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to…
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…
Harness engineering has emerged as an important inference-time technique for large language model (LLM) agents, aiming to improve long-term performance through task decomposition and guided execution. However, more elaborate harnesses are…
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…
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)…
In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, slow inference speed and huge footprints in GPU usage remain the bottleneck of applying pre-trained deep models in production. As a popular method for model compression, knowledge distillation…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves classification accuracy, but it introduces a significant throughput penalty with rationale generation (Wei et al., 2022; Cheng and Van Durme, 2024). To resolve this trade-off, we introduce…
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…
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories under token-level teacher supervision, but existing methods are capped by a single-teacher capability ceiling: when the teacher errs, the student inherits the error. OPD…
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…
On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference…
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…
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…