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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…

Large recommendation models have demonstrated substantial potential gains under scaling laws, yet these gains are difficult to realize in industrial recommendation systems because real-world deployment requires lightweight models with…

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…

Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

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…

In self-supervised learning, self-distilled methods have shown impressive performance, learning representations useful for downstream tasks and even displaying emergent properties. However, state-of-the-art methods usually rely on ensembles…

Knowledge distillation methods have recently shown to be a promising direction to speedup the synthesis of large-scale diffusion models by requiring only a few inference steps. While several powerful distillation methods were recently…

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…

Capability distillation applies knowledge distillation to selected model capabilities, aiming to compress a large language model (LLM) into a smaller one while preserving the abilities needed for a downstream task. However, most existing…

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have garnered significant research interest. Despite being built upon text-based large language models (LLMs), LALMs frequently exhibit a degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We…

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where…

Model distillation typically focuses on behavioral mimicry, where a student model is trained to replicate a teacher's output while treating its internal computations as a black box. In this work we propose an alternative approach:…

On-policy distillation (OPD) is widely used for LLM post-training. When pushed with a reward-extrapolation coefficient lambda > 1, the student can lift past the teacher in domain, but past a threshold lambda* the same step violates the…

A popular approach to model compression is to train an inexpensive student model to mimic the class probabilities of a highly accurate but cumbersome teacher model. Surprisingly, this two-step knowledge distillation process often leads to…

Unlike existing knowledge distillation methods focus on the baseline settings, where the teacher models and training strategies are not that strong and competing as state-of-the-art approaches, this paper presents a method dubbed DIST to…

Knowledge distillation is the procedure of transferring "knowledge" from a large model (the teacher) to a more compact one (the student), often being used in the context of model compression. When both models have the same architecture,…

Black-box distillation creates student large language models (LLMs) by learning from a proprietary teacher model's text outputs alone, without access to its internal logits or parameters. In this work, we introduce Generative Adversarial…

The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Representation learning has been evolving from traditional supervised training to Contrastive Learning (CL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM). Previous works have demonstrated their pros and cons in specific scenarios, i.e., CL and supervised…