Related papers: Rebellious Student: Reversing Teacher Signals for …
On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…
In this work, we investigate the implicit regularization induced by teacher-student learning dynamics in self-distillation. To isolate its effect, we describe a simple experiment where we consider teachers at random initialization instead…
Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…
Recent advances in test-time scaling have led to the emergence of thinking LLMs that exhibit self-reflective behaviors and multi-step reasoning. While RL drives this self-improvement paradigm, a recent study (Gandhi et al., 2025) shows that…
Recent research on knowledge distillation has increasingly focused on logit distillation because of its simplicity, effectiveness, and versatility in model compression. In this paper, we introduce Refined Logit Distillation (RLD) to address…
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…
Recent advances in model distillation show that data from advanced reasoning models can effectively train smaller student models. However, standard practices discard incorrect reasoning traces -- valuable, yet underutilized data. This paper…
Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances overall accuracy (pass@1) but often fails to improve capability (pass@k) of LLMs in reasoning tasks, while distillation can improve both. In this…
Training reasoning language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) for one-hot correctness inherently relies on the LM being able to explore and solve its task with some chance at initialization. Furthermore, a key use case of…
Reasoning is increasingly crucial for various tasks. While chain-of-thought prompting enables large language models to leverage reasoning effectively, harnessing the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains…
Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to continuously improve from environmental interactions is a central challenge in post-training. While on-policy self-distillation offers a promising paradigm, existing methods predominantly treat…
Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…
Distilling reasoning paths from teacher to student models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides a shortcut for improving the reasoning ability of smaller Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reasoning paths generated by teacher…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for post-training LLM agents, yet its trajectory-level reward signal provides only coarse supervision for long-horizon interaction. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) complements…
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 self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution. A design choice shared by nearly all such methods,…
Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome…
Adversarial Distillation aims to enhance student robustness by guiding the student with a robust teacher's soft labels within the min-max adversarial training framework, yet its success is notoriously inconsistent: a more robust teacher…