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Vision-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) typically obtains performance benefit by using high capacity and relatively large convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, a large network leads to higher inference costs (power, latency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-01 Sam Green , Craig M. Vineyard , Çetin Kaya Koç

Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome…

We introduce ORPO-Distill, a general-purpose method for cross-architecture LLM distillation that formulates the problem as a preference optimization task. Unlike standard CoT distillation, the approach transfers knowledge through diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Aasheesh Singh , Vishal Vaddina , Dagnachew Birru

Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency, but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xianwei Chen , Shimin Zhang , Jibin Wu

Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) has become a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning alignment, prized for its efficacy in foregoing an explicit value-critic by leveraging reward normalization across sampled trajectory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Redacted by arXiv

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Qianhao Yuan , Jie Lou , Xing Yu , Hongyu Lin , Le Sun , Xianpei Han , Yaojie Lu

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve accuracy on complex tasks. However, always generating lengthy reasoning traces is inefficient, leading to excessive token usage and higher…

Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Weichen Yu , Xiaomin Li , Yizhou Zhao , Xiaoze Liu , Ruowang Zhang , Haixin Wang , Yinyi Luo , Chen Henry Wu , Gaurav Mittal , Matt Fredrikson , Yu Hu

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Junfeng Fang , Zhepei Hong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Gengsheng Li , Houcheng Jiang , Dan Zhang , Haiyun Guo , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in business-critical domains such as finance, education, healthcare, and customer support, where users expect consistent and reliable recommendations. Yet LLMs often exhibit variability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sonal Prabhune , Balaji Padmanabhan , Kaushik Dutta

In modern large language models (LLMs), LLM alignment is of crucial importance and is typically achieved through methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). However, in most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Songming Zhang , Xue Zhang , Tong Zhang , Bojie Hu , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student models under their own induced distribution while leveraging supervision from stronger teachers. We identify a failure mode of OPD: as training progresses, on-policy rollouts can undergo abrupt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Feng Luo , Yu-Neng Chuang , Guanchu Wang , Zicheng Xu , Xiaotian Han , Tianyi Zhang , Vladimir Braverman

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing large language models (LLMs). Recent Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) estimates advantages using multiple on-policy outputs per prompt, leading to high computational costs and low…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Siheng Li , Zhanhui Zhou , Wai Lam , Chao Yang , Chaochao Lu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuqian Fu , Haohuan Huang , Kaiwen Jiang , Jiacai Liu , Zhuo Jiang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a popular training paradigm in the LLM community. This paradigm selects a larger model as the teacher to provide dense, fine-grained signals for each sampled trajectory, in contrast to reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Chenxu Yang , Chuanyu Qin , Qingyi Si , Minghui Chen , Naibin Gu , Dingyu Yao , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang , Jiaqi Wang , Nan Duan

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…

Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent advances, distilled models frequently suffer from superficial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zhen Tan , Chengshuai Zhao , Song Wang , Jundong Li , Tianlong Chen , Huan Liu

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

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