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Recent work has shown that distilling reasoning traces from a larger teacher model via supervised finetuning outperforms reinforcement learning with the smaller student model alone (Guo et al. 2025). However, there has not been a systematic…
Knowledge distillation allows smaller neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. Traditional methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive fine-tuning,…
Recent advances in deep learning has lead to rapid developments in the field of image retrieval. However, the best performing architectures incur significant computational cost. Recent approaches tackle this issue using knowledge…
We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…
In this paper, we propose that small models may not need to absorb the cost of pre-training to reap its benefits. Instead, they can capitalize on the astonishing results achieved by modern, enormous models to a surprising degree. We observe…
Reasoning-oriented language models achieve strong performance by generating long chain-of-thought traces at inference time. However, this capability comes with substantial and often excessive computational cost, which can materialize in…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving. Recent methods have improved reasoning through expanded corpus and multistage training…
Distillation is an effective knowledge-transfer technique that uses predicted distributions of a powerful teacher model as soft targets to train a less-parameterized student model. A pre-trained high capacity teacher, however, is not always…
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We…
Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to find a policy that achieves high rewards while satisfying cost constraints. When learning from scratch, safe RL agents tend to be overly conservative, which impedes exploration and restrains the…
The performance of a distillation-based compressed network is governed by the quality of distillation. The reason for the suboptimal distillation of a large network (teacher) to a smaller network (student) is largely attributed to the gap…
The carbon footprint of natural language processing research has been increasing in recent years due to its reliance on large and inefficient neural network implementations. Distillation is a network compression technique which attempts to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…
Techniques such as ensembling and distillation promise model quality improvements when paired with almost any base model. However, due to increased test-time cost (for ensembles) and increased complexity of the training pipeline (for…
Large language models have led to significant progress across many NLP tasks, although their massive sizes often incur substantial computational costs. Distillation has become a common practice to compress these large and highly capable…
Knowledge distillation involves transferring the predictive capabilities of large, high-performing AI models (teachers) to smaller models (students) that can operate in environments with limited computing power. In this paper, we address…
Knowledge distillation can be a cost-effective technique to distill knowledge in Large Language Models, if the teacher output logits can be pre-computed and cached. However, successfully applying this to pre-training remains largely…
On-policy distillation (OPD), which supervises a student on its own sampled trajectories, has emerged as a data-efficient post-training method for improving reasoning while avoiding the reward dependence of reinforcement learning and the…
Post-training of language models (LMs) increasingly relies on the following two stages: (i) knowledge distillation, where the LM is trained to imitate a larger teacher LM, and (ii) reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where…
Distilling the thinking traces of a Large Language Model (LLM) with reasoning capabilities into a smaller model has been proven effective. Yet, there is a scarcity of work done on how model performances scale with the quantity of…