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Related papers: Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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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

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn effective policies from a static dataset without requiring further agent-environment interactions. However, its practical adoption is often hindered by the need for explicit reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guobin Shen , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Lei Huang , Jindong Li , Dongcheng Zhao , Xing Yu

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

Although pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit impressive generalization in robotic manipulation, post-training remains crucial to ensure reliable performance during deployment. However, standard offline Supervised…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Zhide Zhong , Haodong Yan , Junfeng Li , Junjie He , Tianran Zhang , Haoang Li

On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods replaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiaohang Tang , Keyue Jiang , Che Liu , Qifang Zhao , Xiaoxiao Xu , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic

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

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) post-training approaches primarily optimize the final output policy using sparse outcome-level rewards, while largely overlooking predictive signals encoded in intermediate representations. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinyu Liu , Darryl Cherian Jacob , Yang Zhou , Jindong Wang , Pan He

Reinforcement learning can train LLM agents from sparse task rewards, but long-horizon credit assignment remains challenging: a single success-or-failure signal must be distributed across many actions. Existing methods rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Tianyi Lyu , Yang Li , Yichuan Ma , Peiji Li , Linyang Li , Qipeng Guo , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

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

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yufei Ma , Zihan Liang , Ben Chen , Zhipeng Qian , Huangyu Dai , Lingtao Mao , Xuxin Zhang , Chenyi Lei , Wenwu Ou

GRPO-style RLVR trains reasoning models from multiple on-policy attempts per prompt, but typically uses these attempts only through terminal rewards. We show that a mixed group contains a richer process signal: a correct completion is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhiquan Tan , Yinrong Hong

On-policy distillation (OPD) and on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) have emerged as promising post-training methods for large language models, offering dense token-level supervision on trajectories sampled from the model's own policy.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Siqi Zhu , Xuyan Ye , Hongyu Lu , Weiye Shi , Ge Liu

Reinforcement learning has become a widely used post-training approach for LLM agents, where training commonly relies on outcome-level rewards that provide only coarse supervision. While finer-grained credit assignment is promising for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sijia Li , Yuchen Huang , Zifan Liu , Yanping Li , Jingjing Fu , Li Zhao , Jiang Bian , Ling Zhang , Jun Zhang , Rui Wang

Self-distillation has emerged as a powerful framework for post-training LLMs, where a teacher conditioned on extra information guides a student without it, both from the same model. While this guidance is useful when the student has failed,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jeonghye Kim , Jiwon Jeon , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning heavily relies on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, standard algorithms like GRPO apply sequence-level rewards uniformly to all tokens,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhenlin Wei , Pu Jian , Yingzhuo Deng , Xiaohan Wang , Jiajun Chai , Zhexin Hu , Wei Lin , Shanbin Zhang , Guojun Yin

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been used in image classification for model compression. However, rare studies apply this technology on single-stage object detectors. Focal loss shows that the accumulated errors of easily-classified samples…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Shitao Tang , Litong Feng , Wenqi Shao , Zhanghui Kuang , Wei Zhang , Yimin Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qiyong Zhong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Xin Lin , Jie Sun , Houcheng Jiang , Xiang Wang , Junfeng Fang