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Large language models have recently enabled a generative paradigm for query expansion, but their high inference cost makes direct deployment difficult in practical retrieval systems. To address this issue, a retrieval-feedback-driven…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks via long chain-of-thought (CoT), yet their immense computational overhead hinders real-world deployment. LLM reasoning distillation addresses this by…

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have underscored its potential for incentivizing reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing step-level efforts suffer from costly annotations that limit domain…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard route to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) into compact students, yet most pipelines uniformly apply token-wise loss regardless of teacher confidence. This indiscriminate supervision amplifies…

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…

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,…

Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same…

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

On-policy distillation has recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard sequence-level imitation, training a student by scoring its own rollouts with a teacher model. However, we observe ``Off-policy Teacher Decay'' problem in…

Growing efforts to improve knowledge distillation (KD) in large language models (LLMs) replace dense teacher supervision with selective distillation, which uses a subset of token positions, vocabulary classes, or training samples for…

Knowledge distillation is an efficient strategy to use data generated by large "teacher" language models to train smaller capable "student" models, but selecting the optimal teacher for a specific student-task combination requires expensive…

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise,…

We propose Algorithm Distillation (AD), a method for distilling reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms into neural networks by modeling their training histories with a causal sequence model. Algorithm Distillation treats learning to…

Partial observability is a notorious challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), due to the need to learn complex, history-dependent policies. Recent empirical successes have used privileged expert distillation--which leverages availability…

Although pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit impressive generalization in robotic manipulation, post-training remains crucial to ensure reliable performance during deployment. However, standard offline Supervised…

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised…

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…

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…