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Injecting new reasoning knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) via post-training often induces catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies emphasize the importance of on-policy data but suggest that KL-divergence fails to mitigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Wenye Lin , Kai Han

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junlong Ke , Zichen Wen , Weijia Li , Conghui He , Linfeng Zhang

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

Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive LLMs, offering competitive performance while supporting unique generation capabilities such as inpainting. We explore how inpainting can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Siyan Zhao , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Miao Liu , Chenyu Wang , Bo Liu , Yuandong Tian , Guan Pang , Sean Bell , Aditya Grover , Feiyu Chen

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

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Siyan Zhao , Devaansh Gupta , Qinqing Zheng , Aditya Grover

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Krishna Sayana , Ketan Todi , Ambarish Jash

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Tianyi Wang , Yixia Li , Long Li , Yibiao Chen , Shaohan Huang , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities through pretraining and alignment. However, superior short-context LLMs may underperform in long-context scenarios due to insufficient long-context alignment. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Guanzheng Chen , Xin Li , Michael Qizhe Shieh , Lidong Bing

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become the standard recipe for improving LLM reasoning, but the dominant algorithm GRPO assigns a single trajectory-level advantage to every token, diluting the signal at pivotal reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yu Li , Rui Miao , Tian Lan , Zhengling Qi

Complex claim verification requires decomposing sentences into verifiable subclaims, yet existing methods struggle to align decomposition quality with verification performance. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that jointly…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising route to parallel and efficient text generation, but improving their reasoning ability requires effective post-training. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zichao Yu , Shengze Xu , Bingqing Jiang , Wenyi Zhang , Difan Zou

Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yumeng Zhang , Zhengbang Yang , Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake , Zhuangdi Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate unnecessarily verbose Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning that increases computational costs and latency without proportional performance gains. In this paper, we propose Fine-grained Group policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Xinchen Han , Hossam Afifi , Michel Marot , Xilu Wang , Lu Yin

Knowledge distillation has emerged as a powerful technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) into efficient, deployable architectures while preserving their advanced capabilities. Recent advances in low-rank knowledge…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-25 Alberlucia Rafael Soarez , Daniel Kim , Mariana Costa , Alejandro Torre

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

Online on-policy preference learning algorithms for language model alignment such as online direct policy optimization (DPO) can significantly outperform their offline counterparts. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juno Kim , Jihun Yun , Jason D. Lee , Kwang-Sung Jun

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Liang Lin , Chunxi Luo , Xin Xu , Kai Yang , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Tianxiang Zhao , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit implicit biases and discriminatory tendencies that reflect underlying social stereotypes. While recent alignment techniques such as RLHF and DPO have mitigated some of these issues, they remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Deng Yixuan , Ji Xiaoqiang