English
Related papers

Related papers: Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in…

200 papers

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hongbin Zhang , Chaozheng Wang , Kehai Chen , Youcheng Pan , Yang Xiang , Jinpeng Wang , Min Zhang

Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siyan Zhao , Zhihui Xie , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Guan Pang , Feiyu Chen , Aditya Grover

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xin Yu , Liuchen Liao , Yiwen Zhang , Yingchen Yu , Lingzhou Xue , Qinzhen Guo

We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiao Yang , Xiaoyun Wang , Weitong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xiaogeng Liu , Xinyan Wang , Yingzi Ma , Yechao Zhang , Chaowei Xiao

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junlong Ke , Zichen Wen , Weijia Li , Conghui He , Linfeng Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guobin Shen , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Lei Huang , Jindong Li , Dongcheng Zhao , Xing Yu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Chenxu Yang , Chuanyu Qin , Qingyi Si , Minghui Chen , Naibin Gu , Dingyu Yao , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang , Jiaqi Wang , Nan Duan

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ke Zhang , Yunjie Tian , Dongdi Zhao , Yijiang Li , Yuanye Liu , Vishal M Patel , Di Fu

Self-distillation enables language models to learn on-policy from their own trajectories by using the same model as both student and teacher, with the teacher being conditioned on privileged information unavailable to the student. Such…

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has gained wide attraction as an LLM post-training paradigm due to its effectiveness in improving capabilities without introducing model distribution drift, and consequently, regression in general tasks.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Aristotelis Lazaridis , Dylan Bates , Aman Sharma , Brian King , Vincent Lu , Jack FitzGerald

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by providing dense token-level supervision for on-policy rollouts. However, existing OPSD methods often yield limited gains on in-domain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ziqi Zhao , Xinyu Ma , Liu Yang , Yujie Feng , Daiting Shi , Jingzhou He , Xin Xin , Zhaochun Ren , Xiao-Ming Wu

The push to compress and impart the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) into more deployable and efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) has benefited from improvements in knowledge distillation (KD) techniques. These techniques…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Shreyansh Padarha

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wenkai Yang , Weijie Liu , Ruobing Xie , Kai Yang , Saiyong Yang , Yankai Lin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jianze Wang , Ying Liu , Jinlong Chen , Xuchun Hu , Qilong Zhang , Yu Cao , Jun Wang , Hua Yang , Yong Xie , Qianglong Chen

On-policy distillation (OPD), which samples trajectories from the student model and supervises them with a teacher at the token level, avoids relying solely on verifiable terminal rewards and can yield better generalization than off-policy…

The deployment and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences. Traditional distillation methods, which transfer the capabilities of LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Yifei Zhang , Bo Pan , Chen Ling , Yuntong Hu , Liang Zhao

Improving large language model (LLM) reasoning requires supervision that is both aligned with the model's own test-time states and informative at the token level. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards provides on-policy exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zhiquan Tan , Yinrong Hong

Small language models (SLMs) are crucial for applications with strict latency and computational constraints, yet achieving high performance remains challenging. Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer capabilities from large teacher…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jingyu Peng , Maolin Wang , Hengyi Cai , Yuchen Li , Kai Zhang , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Xiangyu Zhao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jeonghye Kim , Xufang Luo , Minbeom Kim , Sangmook Lee , Dohyung Kim , Jiwon Jeon , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›