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Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gang Li , Yan Chen , Ming Lin , Tianbao Yang

Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Jinning Li , Xinyi Liu , Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Chen Tang , Wei Zhan

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a promising policy-based approach for Large Language Model alignment, yet its performance is often limited by training instability and suboptimal convergence. In this paper, we identify and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Marco Simoni , Aleksandar Fontana , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino , Paolo Mori

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Liang Lin , Chunxi Luo , Xin Xu , Kai Yang , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Tianxiang Zhao , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

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

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which is widely adopted by R1-like reasoning models, has advanced mathematical reasoning. Nevertheless, GRPO faces challenges in reward sparsity, verbosity, and inadequate focus on problem…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jixiao Zhang , Chunsheng Zuo

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to continuously improve from environmental interactions is a central challenge in post-training. While on-policy self-distillation offers a promising paradigm, existing methods predominantly treat…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yuwei Zhang , Sha Li , Changlong Yu , Qin Lu , Shuowei Jin , Chengyu Dong , Haoran Liu , Ilgee Hong , Xintong Li , Zhenyu Shi , Bing Yin , Jingbo Shang

Context distillation enables language models to internalize in-context knowledge into their parameters. In our work, we propose On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a framework that bridges on-policy distillation with context distillation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

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

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) benefit substantially from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning tasks. However, these recipes perform poorly in instruction-based molecular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xuan Li , Zhanke Zhou , Zongze Li , Jiangchao Yao , Yu Rong , Lu Zhang , Bo Han

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL), particularly Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has become the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). While policy ratio clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jianzhi Yan , Le Liu , Youcheng Pan , Shiwei Chen , Yang Xiang , Buzhou Tang

Knowledge distillation is central to LLM post-training, yet its design space remains poorly understood, especially alongside reinforcement learning (RL). We show that the prevailing paradigms, off-policy distillation and on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Anhao Zhao , Haoran Xin , Yingqi Fan , Junlong Tong , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the standard for training reasoning capabilities in large language models through reinforcement learning. By estimating advantages using group-mean rewards rather than a learned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Anisha Garg , Claire Zhang , Nishit Neema , David Bick , Ganesh Venkatesh , Joel Hestness

The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm has demonstrated considerable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as evidenced by DeepSeek-R1. However, the absence of intermediate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Fei Ding , Baiqiao Wang , Zijian Zeng , Youwei Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yaxuan Li , Yuxin Zuo , Bingxiang He , Jinqian Zhang , Chaojun Xiao , Cheng Qian , Tianyu Yu , Huan-ang Gao , Wenkai Yang , Zhiyuan Liu , Ning Ding

Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency, but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xianwei Chen , Shimin Zhang , Jibin Wu

We introduce Layered Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation (LSSKD) framework for training compact deep learning models. Unlike traditional methods that rely on pre-trained teacher networks, our approach appends auxiliary classifiers to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Tarique Dahri , Zulfiqar Ali Memon , Zhenyu Yu , Mohd. Yamani Idna Idris , Sheheryar Khan , Sadiq Ahmad , Maged Shoman , Saddam Aziz , Rizwan Qureshi