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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

Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Guochao Jiang , Wenfeng Feng , Guofeng Quan , Chuzhan Hao , Yuewei Zhang , Guohua Liu , Hao Wang

Knowledge distillation(KD) is a common approach to improve model performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where a student model is trained to imitate the output behaviour of a teacher model. However, traditional KD methods suffer…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-02 Liyong Guo , Xiaoyu Yang , Quandong Wang , Yuxiang Kong , Zengwei Yao , Fan Cui , Fangjun Kuang , Wei Kang , Long Lin , Mingshuang Luo , Piotr Zelasko , Daniel Povey

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Nan Jia , Haojin Yang , Xing Ma , Jiesong Lian , Shuailiang Zhang , Weipeng Zhang , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai , Zequn Sun

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiao Yang , Xiaoyun Wang , Weitong Zhang

On-policy distillation (OPD), which aligns the student with the teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories, has demonstrated strong empirical gains in improving student performance and often outperforms off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wenkai Yang , Weijie Liu , Ruobing Xie , Kai Yang , Saiyong Yang , Yankai Lin

This work introduces Variational Diffusion Distillation (VDD), a novel method that distills denoising diffusion policies into Mixtures of Experts (MoE) through variational inference. Diffusion Models are the current state-of-the-art in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Hongyi Zhou , Denis Blessing , Ge Li , Onur Celik , Xiaogang Jia , Gerhard Neumann , Rudolf Lioutikov

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hongbin Zhang , Chaozheng Wang , Kehai Chen , Youcheng Pan , Yang Xiang , Jinpeng Wang , Min Zhang

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has many success stories, the large-scale deployment of policies learned through these advanced techniques in safety-critical scenarios is hindered by their lack of formal guarantees. Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Florent Delgrange , Ann Nowé , Guillermo A. Pérez

Many existing studies have achieved significant improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), while the enhancement of reasoning abilities in small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Zhong Guan , Likang Wu , Hongke Zhao , Jiahui Wang , Le Wu

On-policy self-distillation has become a strong recipe for LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher supervises the student's own rollouts while conditioning on the reference solution. A design choice shared by nearly all such methods,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zihao Han , Tiangang Zhang , Huaibin Wang , Yilun Sun

Distillation addresses the slow sampling problem in diffusion models by creating models with smaller size or fewer steps that approximate the behavior of high-step teachers. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Amirhossein Tighkhorshid , Zahra Dehghanian , Gholamali Aminian , Chengchun Shi , Hamid R. Rabiee

Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhenglin Wan , Jingxuan Wu , Xingrui Yu , Chubin Zhang , Mingcong Lei , Bo An , Ivor W. Tsang , Yang You

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 (RL) has been widely used to train LLM agents for multi-turn interactive tasks, but its sample efficiency is severely limited by sparse rewards and long horizons. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) alleviates this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Wang , Guozhi Wang , Han Xiao , Yufeng Zhou , Yue Pan , Jichao Wang , Ke Xu , Yafei Wen , Xiaohu Ruan , Xiaoxin Chen , Honggang Qi

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

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer the knowledge of a more capable yet cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model. In recent years, relation-based KD methods have fallen behind, as their instance-matching counterparts…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Weijia Zhang , Fei Xie , Weidong Cai , Chao Ma

Text-to-3D generation based on score distillation of pre-trained 2D diffusion models has gained increasing interest, with variational score distillation (VSD) as a remarkable example. VSD proves that vanilla score distillation can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Yu Lei , Bingde Liu , Qingsong Xie , Haonan Lu , Zhijie Deng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Miao Rang , Zhenni Bi , Hang Zhou , Kai Han , Xuechun Wang , An Xiao , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang , Hanting Chen

Training language models to produce both correct answers and sound reasoning remains an open challenge. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards typically optimizes only final outcomes, which can lead to a failure mode where task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Kyuyoung Kim , Kevin Wang , Yunfei Xie , Peiyang Xu , Peiyao Sheng , Chen Wei , Zhangyang Wang , Jinwoo Shin , Pramod Viswanath , Sewoong Oh