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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning, but this ability is not equally accessible across languages. Especially low-resource languages exhibit much lower reasoning performance. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Michael A. Hedderich , Hinrich Schütze

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). A widely adopted method, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong empirical results in training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tommy He , Jerome Sieber , Matteo Saponati

When a model produces a correct solution under reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), every token receives the same reward signal regardless of whether it was a decisive reasoning step or a grammatical filler. A natural fix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ahmed Heakl , Abdelrahman M. Shaker , Youssef Mohamed , Rania Elbadry , Omar Fetouh , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Salman Khan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging direct outcome verification instead of learned reward models. Building on this paradigm, Group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Jingyi Wang , Lei Zhu , Tengjin Weng , Song-Li Wu , Haochen Tan , Jierun Chen , Chaofan Tao , Haoli Bai , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Xiao-Ping Zhang

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yang Li , Erik Nijkamp , Semih Yavuz , Shafiq Joty

Large language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning face a fundamental challenge: on problems the model cannot solve at all - "cliff" prompts - the RL gradient vanishes entirely, preventing any learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Ken Ding

On-policy distillation is pivotal for transferring reasoning capabilities to capacity-constrained models, yet remains prone to instability and negative transfer. We show that on-policy distillation can be interpreted, both theoretically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Jongwoo Ko , Sara Abdali , Young Jin Kim , Tianyi Chen , Pashmina Cameron

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

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

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Soo Min Kwon , Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Himanshu Jain , Sanjiv Kumar

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 distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yifan Song , Minrui Xu , Yongxin Wang , Yiwei Wang , Xiaodan Liang , Jing Tang

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

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Among RLVR algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhaokang Liao , Yingguo Gao , Yi Yang , Yongheng Hu , Jingting Ding

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ke Zhang , Yunjie Tian , Dongdi Zhao , Yijiang Li , Yuanye Liu , Vishal M Patel , Di Fu

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

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) is a unified learning framework in which a single large language model acts simultaneously as both teacher and student. Unlike conventional knowledge distillation that relies on a separate, often larger…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Fangming Cui , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li