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On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories. This framework typically uses reverse KL divergence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Woogyeol Jin , Taywon Min , Yongjin Yang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Dennis Wei , Nathalie Baracaldo , Kimin Lee

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has recently emerged as an alternative to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), promising higher accuracy and shorter responses through token-level credit assignment from a self-teacher…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jaehoon Kim , Dongha Lee

Distillation via sampling reasoning traces exposes closed-source frontier models to adversarial third parties who can bypass their guardrails and misappropriate their capabilities. Antidistillation methods aim to address this by poisoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Max Hartman , Vidhata Jayaraman , Moulik Choraria , Yash Savani , Lav R. Varshney

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive tasks, but its sample efficiency is severely limited by sparse rewards and long horizons. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) alleviates this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Wang , Guozhi Wang , Han Xiao , Yufeng Zhou , Yue Pan , Jichao Wang , Ke Xu , Yafei Wen , Xiaohu Ruan , Xiaoxin Chen , Honggang Qi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yang Li , Erik Nijkamp , Semih Yavuz , Shafiq Joty

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

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…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Fangming Cui , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li

The performance of autoregressive models on natural language generation tasks has dramatically improved due to the adoption of deep, self-attentive architectures. However, these gains have come at the cost of hindering inference speed,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Alexander Lin , Jeremy Wohlwend , Howard Chen , Tao Lei

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has made remarkable progress in the last few years and become a popular paradigm for model compression and knowledge transfer. However, almost all existing KD algorithms are data-driven, i.e., relying on a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Gongfan Fang , Jie Song , Chengchao Shen , Xinchao Wang , Da Chen , Mingli Song

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tommy He , Jerome Sieber , Matteo Saponati

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 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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

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

Knowledge distillation is one of the most effective methods for model compression. Previous studies have focused on the student model effectively training the predictive distribution of the teacher model. However, during training, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Junseok Lee , Nahoon Kim , Sangyong Lee , Chang-Jae Chun

Knowledge distillation between machine learning models has opened many new avenues for parameter count reduction, performance improvements, or amortizing training time when changing architectures between the teacher and student network. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Jonathan Raiman

The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Hao Wang , Hao Gu , Hongming Piao , Kaixiong Gong , Yuxiao Ye , Xiangyu Yue , Sirui Han , Yike Guo , Dapeng Wu

Current long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models excel at mathematical reasoning but rely on slow and error-prone natural language traces. Tool-augmented agents address arithmetic via code execution, but often falter on complex logical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Weihua Du , Pranjal Aggarwal , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang

The knowledge distillation uses a high-performance teacher network to guide the student network. However, the performance gap between the teacher and student networks can affect the student's training. This paper proposes a novel knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Songling Zhu , Ronghua Shang , Bo Yuan , Weitong Zhang , Yangyang Li , Licheng Jiao

When a model produces a correct solution under reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), every token receives the same reward signal regardless of whether it was a decisive reasoning step or a grammatical filler. A natural fix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ahmed Heakl , Abdelrahman M. Shaker , Youssef Mohamed , Rania Elbadry , Omar Fetouh , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Salman Khan

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins