English
Related papers

Related papers: Training with Harnesses: On-Policy Harness Self-Di…

200 papers

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,…

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Pengfei Liu

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Charlie Snell , Dan Klein , Ruiqi Zhong

While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuxuan Jiang , Runchao Li , Shubhashis Roy Dipta , Dawei Li , Zhao Yang

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) construct the continuous dynamics of hidden units using ordinary differential equations specified by a neural network, demonstrating promising results on many tasks. However, Neural ODEs…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Haoyu Chu , Shikui Wei , Qiming Lu , Yao Zhao

Safety alignment often improves robustness to harmful queries at the cost of reasoning ability, a tradeoff known as the safety tax. A common cause is distributional mismatch: supervised fine-tuning trains the target model on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yu Fu , Longxuan Yu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Zhipeng Wei , Hui Liu , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

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

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dengyang Jiang , Xin Jin , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Mingzhe Zheng , Ruoyi Du , Xiangpeng Yang , Qilong Wu , Zhen Li , Peng Gao , Harry Yang , Steven Hoi

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Miao Rang , Zhenni Bi , Hang Zhou , Kai Han , Xuechun Wang , An Xiao , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang , Hanting Chen

Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated increasing capabilities for continuous control problems, including agents that can move with skill and agility through their environment. An open problem in this setting is that of developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-14 Glen Berseth , Cheng Xie , Paul Cernek , Michiel Van de Panne

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Caiyue Xu , Chenfei Liu , Liting Zhang , Yuhang Jia , Yanzhe Zhang , Hualong Yu , Zichen Xu , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Offline reinforcement learning often requires a quality dataset that we can train a policy on. However, in many situations, it is not possible to get such a dataset, nor is it easy to train a policy to perform well in the actual environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jonathan Light , Yuanzhe Liu , Ziniu Hu

Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhenglin Wan , Jingxuan Wu , Xingrui Yu , Chubin Zhang , Mingcong Lei , Bo An , Ivor W. Tsang , Yang You

How to learn highly compact yet effective sentence representation? Pre-trained language models have been effective in many NLP tasks. However, these models are often huge and produce large sentence embeddings. Moreover, there is a big…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Xuandong Zhao , Zhiguo Yu , Ming Wu , Lei Li

Dataset distillation aims to condense large datasets into a small number of synthetic examples that can be used as drop-in replacements when training new models. It has applications to interpretability, neural architecture search, privacy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Andrei Lupu , Chris Lu , Jarek Liesen , Robert Tjarko Lange , Jakob Foerster

Knowledge distillation conducts an effective model compression method while holding some limitations:(1) the feature based distillation methods only focus on distilling the feature map but are lack of transferring the relation of data…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Muzhou Yu , Sia Huat Tan , Kailu Wu , Runpei Dong , Linfeng Zhang , Kaisheng Ma

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Daniil Tiapkin , Daniele Calandriello , Johan Ferret , Sarah Perrin , Nino Vieillard , Alexandre Ramé , Mathieu Blondel

Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) improves sample efficiency while preserving privacy; however, most existing studies assume homogeneous agents, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper investigates FedRL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Wenzheng Jiang , Ji Wang , Xiongtao Zhang , Weidong Bao , Cheston Tan , Flint Xiaofeng Fan