Related papers: Respecting Self-Uncertainty in On-Policy Self-Dist…

Advances in self-distillation have shown that when knowledge is distilled from a teacher to a student using the same deep learning (DL) architecture, the student performance can surpass the teacher particularly when the network is…

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student model on its own rollouts using dense feedback from a stronger teacher. Prior literature suggests that, provided teacher feedback is available, supervising the full sequence of response tokens…

Knowledge distillation typically transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student model by minimizing differences between their output distributions. However, existing distillation approaches largely focus on mimicking absolute…

Recent research on knowledge distillation has increasingly focused on logit distillation because of its simplicity, effectiveness, and versatility in model compression. In this paper, we introduce Refined Logit Distillation (RLD) to address…

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) aims to develop lifelong learning agents to continuously acquire knowledge across diverse tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This requires efficiently managing the stability-plasticity…

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…

Knowledge distillation (KD) enables a smaller "student" model to mimic a larger "teacher" model by transferring knowledge from the teacher's output or features. However, most KD methods treat all samples uniformly, overlooking the varying…

Knowledge distillation is typically realized by transferring a teacher model's knowledge into a student's parameters through supervised or reinforcement-based optimization. While effective, such approaches require repeated parameter updates…

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…

Knowledge distillation is a powerful technique for transferring knowledge from a pre-trained teacher model to a student model. However, the true potential of knowledge transfer has not been fully explored. Existing approaches primarily…

The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents,…

Despite the empirical success of knowledge distillation, current state-of-the-art methods are computationally expensive to train, which makes them difficult to adopt in practice. To address this problem, we introduce two distinct…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for post-training LLM agents, yet its trajectory-level reward signal provides only coarse supervision for long-horizon interaction. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) complements…

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…

Representation-based retrieval models, so-called bi-encoders, estimate the relevance of a document to a query by calculating the similarity of their respective embeddings. Current state-of-the-art bi-encoders are trained using an expensive…

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning. However, we find that its standard advantage weighted…

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…