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Related papers: Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Kaiyuan Liu , Ziyuan Zhuang , Yang Bai , Bing Wang , Rongxiang Weng , Jieping Ye

Due to constraints on privacy, cost, and latency, on-premise deployment of small models is increasingly common. However, most practical pipelines stop at supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and fail to reach the reinforcement learning (RL)…

Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Healthcare providers are increasingly using machine learning to predict patient outcomes to make meaningful interventions. However, despite innovations in this area, deep learning models often struggle to match performance of shallow linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-18 Rohan S. Kodialam , Rebecca Boiarsky , Justin Lim , Neil Dixit , Aditya Sai , David Sontag

Generative models offer a promising paradigm for the final stage reranking in multi-stage recommender systems, with the ability to capture inter-item dependencies within reranked lists. However, their practical deployment still faces two…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Kai Cheng , Hao Wang , Wei Guo , Weiwen Liu , Yong Liu , Yawen Li , Enhong Chen

When applying offline reinforcement learning (RL) in healthcare scenarios, the out-of-distribution (OOD) issues pose significant risks, as inappropriate generalization beyond clinical expertise can result in potentially harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Runze Yan , Xun Shen , Akifumi Wachi , Sebastien Gros , Anni Zhao , Xiao Hu

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own rollouts using a privileged teacher, but its standard objective weights all generated tokens equally, implicitly treating the privileged teacher target as equally reliable at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xiaogeng Liu , Xinyan Wang , Yingzi Ma , Yechao Zhang , Chaowei Xiao

On-policy distillation (OPD) has shown strong potential for transferring reasoning ability from frontier or domain-specific models to smaller students. While effective on static single-turn tasks, its behavior in multi-turn agent settings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jiaqi Wang , Wenhao Zhang , Weijie Shi , Yaliang Li , James Cheng

Pretrained foundation models have exhibited extraordinary in-context learning performance, allowing zero-shot generalization to new tasks not encountered during pretraining. In the case of reinforcement learning (RL), in-context RL (ICRL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Weiqin Chen , Santiago Paternain

Large language model post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and distillation are often analyzed through their loss functions: maximum likelihood, policy gradients, forward KL, reverse KL, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Dong Nie

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

We present Reinforcement Learning via Auxiliary Task Distillation (AuxDistill), a new method that enables reinforcement learning (RL) to perform long-horizon robot control problems by distilling behaviors from auxiliary RL tasks. AuxDistill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Abhinav Narayan Harish , Larry Heck , Josiah P. Hanna , Zsolt Kira , Andrew Szot

On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has emerged as a dominant post-training paradigm for large language models, especially for reasoning domains. However, OPD remains unstable in practice due to the high gradient variance of its single-sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Minjae Oh , Sangjun Song , Gyubin Choi , Yunho Choi , Yohan Jo

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for agentic knowledge base question answering (KBQA), where a model must issue executable actions, observe knowledge-base feedback, and eventually return an answer. However, current RL-based KBQA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xin Sun , Jianan Xie , Zhongqi Chen , Qiang Liu , Shu Wu , Bowen Song , Weiqiang Wang , Zilei Wang , Liang Wang

Knowledge distillation often involves how to define and transfer knowledge from teacher to student effectively. Although recent self-supervised contrastive knowledge achieves the best performance, forcing the network to learn such knowledge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Chuanguang Yang , Zhulin An , Linhang Cai , Yongjun Xu

Safety alignment often improves robustness to harmful queries at the cost of reasoning ability, a tradeoff known as the safety tax. A common cause is distributional mismatch: supervised fine-tuning trains the target model on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yu Fu , Longxuan Yu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Zhipeng Wei , Hui Liu , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Training long-horizon LLM agents with reinforcement learning is challenging because sparse outcome rewards reveal whether a task succeeds, but not which intermediate actions caused the outcome or how they should be corrected. Recent methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Woongyeng Yeo , Yumin Choi , Taekyung Ki , Sung Ju Hwang

Diffusion and flow models achieve State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) generative performance, yet many practically important behaviors such as fine-grained prompt fidelity, compositional correctness, and text rendering are weakly specified by score or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yuanzhi Zhu , Xi Wang , Stéphane Lathuilière , Vicky Kalogeiton

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

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xinsen Zhang , Zhenkai Ding , Tianjun Pan , Run Yang , Chun Kang , Xue Xiong , Jingnan Gu