English
Related papers

Related papers: Combining On-Policy Optimization and Distillation …

200 papers

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kevin Rojas , Jiahe Lin , Kashif Rasul , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Molei Tao , Wei Deng

Knowledge distillation offers a promising path to transfer reasoning capabilities from large teacher models to efficient student models; however, existing token-level on-policy distillation methods require token-level alignment between the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jing Xiong , Hui Shen , Shansan Gong , Yuxin Cheng , Jianghan Shen , Chaofan Tao , Haochen Tan , Haoli Bai , Lifeng Shang , Ngai Wong

Despite significant advances in long-context reasoning by large language models (LLMs), primarily through Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, these approaches incur substantial computational costs and complexity. In contrast,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Xiaoyu Tian , Sitong Zhao , Haotian Wang , Shuaiting Chen , Yiping Peng , Yunjie Ji , Han Zhao , Xiangang Li

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various applications, but their conversational abilities decline sharply as model size decreases, presenting a barrier to their deployment in resource-constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Zhengze Zhang , Shiqi Wang , Yiqun Shen , Simin Guo , Dahua Lin , Xiaoliang Wang , Nguyen Cam-Tu , Fei Tan

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown exceptional reasoning capabilities, but they also suffer from the issue of overthinking, often generating excessively long and redundant answers. For problems that exceed the model's capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yinan Xia , Haotian Zhang , Huiming Wang

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

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Han Yang , Mingyan Wu , Bailan He , Zeyu Cao , Sikuan Yan , Kevin Qinghong Lin , Zifeng Ding

While reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO) have significantly enhanced Large Language Models, adapting them to diffusion models remains challenging. In particular, GRPO demands a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Jing Tang

This work studies knowledge distillation (KD) for large language models (LLMs) through preference optimization. We propose a reward-guided imitation learning framework for sequential KD, formulating a min-max optimization problem between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Chen Jia

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gang Li , Yan Chen , Ming Lin , Tianbao Yang

Context distillation enables language models to internalize in-context knowledge into their parameters. In our work, we propose On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a framework that bridges on-policy distillation with context distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) shows significant promise for complex video reasoning. However, popular Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) methods, such as outcome-based Group Relative Policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yunxin Li , Xinyu Chen , Zitao Li , Zhenyu Liu , Longyue Wang , Wenhan Luo , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Jongwoo Ko , Sara Abdali , Young Jin Kim , Tianyi Chen , Pashmina Cameron

Existing Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have achieved remarkable progress in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Hsiu-Yuan Huang , Chenming Tang , Weijie Liu , Clive Bai , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

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…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model. Despite its empirical success, the conditions under which…

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

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in post-training techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Kaichen Zhang , Yuzhong Hong , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song , Dingqian Hong , Hui Xiong