Related papers: Combining On-Policy Optimization and Distillation …

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…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

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…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) post-training approaches primarily optimize the final output policy using sparse outcome-level rewards, while largely overlooking predictive signals encoded in intermediate representations. In this paper,…

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from superficial instruction following to rigorous long-horizon reasoning. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a pivotal mechanism for…

Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) provides dense token-level credit assignment for reinforcement learning with large language models by leveraging the model's own feedback-conditioned predictions as a self-teacher. Unlike GRPO,…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

GRPO-style RLVR trains reasoning models from multiple on-policy attempts per prompt, but typically uses these attempts only through terminal rewards. We show that a mixed group contains a richer process signal: a correct completion is a…

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) post-training have leveraged two distinct paradigms to enhance reasoning capabilities: reinforcement learning (RL) and knowledge distillation (KD). While RL enables the emergence of complex…

Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities through large-scale pretraining and post-training reinforcement learning, demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1. However, current post-training methods, such as…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of…

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…

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality…

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 language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning face a fundamental challenge: on problems the model cannot solve at all - "cliff" prompts - the RL gradient vanishes entirely, preventing any learning…