Related papers: Adaptive Teacher Exposure for Self-Distillation in…
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…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…
On-policy distillation is pivotal for transferring reasoning capabilities to capacity-constrained models, yet remains prone to instability and negative transfer. We show that on-policy distillation can be interpreted, both theoretically and…
On-policy distillation (OPD) and on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) have emerged as promising post-training methods for large language models, offering dense token-level supervision on trajectories sampled from the model's own policy.…
On-policy self-distillation has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training language models, in which the model conditions on environment feedback to serve as its own teacher, providing dense token-level rewards without external…
On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…
Alignment techniques enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate outputs that align with human preferences and play a crucial role in their effectiveness. However, their impact often diminishes when applied to Small Language Models…
On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) is a unified learning framework in which a single large language model acts simultaneously as both teacher and student. Unlike conventional knowledge distillation that relies on a separate, often larger…
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…
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a common approach to compress a teacher model to reduce its inference cost and memory footprint, by training a smaller student model. However, in the context of autoregressive language models (LMs), we…
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,…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but this ability is not equally accessible across languages. Especially low-resource languages exhibit much lower reasoning performance. To address…
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…
Knowledge distillation is considered as a training and compression strategy in which two neural networks, namely a teacher and a student, are coupled together during training. The teacher network is supposed to be a trustworthy predictor…
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)…
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…
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We…
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…
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…
Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…