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Related papers: A Brief Overview: On-Policy Self-Distillation In L…

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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) is a technique that compresses large teacher models by training smaller student models to mimic them. The success of KD in auto-regressive language models mainly relies on Reverse KL for mode-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jun Rao , Xuebo Liu , Zepeng Lin , Liang Ding , Jing Li , Dacheng Tao , Min Zhang

On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used,…

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

On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiazhen Huang , Xiao Chen , Xiao Luo , Yong Dai , Senkang Hu , Yuzhi Zhao

Recent advances in knowledge distillation (KD) have enabled smaller student models to approach the performance of larger teacher models. However, popular methods such as supervised KD and on-policy KD, are adversely impacted by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Wenda Xu , Rujun Han , Zifeng Wang , Long T. Le , Dhruv Madeka , Lei Li , William Yang Wang , Rishabh Agarwal , Chen-Yu Lee , Tomas Pfister

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a standard tool for transferring teacher behavior to a smaller student, but it implicitly assumes that teacher and student predictions are comparable token by token, an assumption that fails whenever the two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jie Sun , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Qiyong Zhong , Yilin Cheng , Bichuan Feng , Pengfei Liu , Junfeng Fang , Xiang Wang

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

Black-box knowledge distillation for large language models presents a strict trade-off. Simple off-policy methods (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation) struggle to correct the student's inherent errors. Fully on-policy methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Xiwen Chen , Jingjing Wang , Wenhui Zhu , Peijie Qiu , Xuanzhao Dong , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Alborz Geramifard , Feng Luo

Self-supervised representation learning has proved to be a valuable component for out-of-distribution (OoD) detection with only the texts of in-distribution (ID) examples. These approaches either train a language model from scratch or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Qianhui Wu , Huiqiang Jiang , Haonan Yin , Börje F. Karlsson , Chin-Yew Lin

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime. We break down the design of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhong Zhu , Ruobing Xie , Rui Wang , Pengfei Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet their vast parameter sizes restrict their applicability in resource-constrained settings. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a viable solution by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Rongzhi Zhang , Jiaming Shen , Tianqi Liu , Haorui Wang , Zhen Qin , Feng Han , Jialu Liu , Simon Baumgartner , Michael Bendersky , Chao Zhang

Self-distillation bootstraps large language models (LLMs) by training on their own generations. However, existing methods either rely on external signals to curate self-generated outputs (e.g., correctness filtering, execution feedback, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Guangya Hao , Yitong Shang , Yunbo Long , Zhuokai Zhao , Hanxue Liang

Small language models (SLMs) are crucial for applications with strict latency and computational constraints, yet achieving high performance remains challenging. Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer capabilities from large teacher…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jingyu Peng , Maolin Wang , Hengyi Cai , Yuchen Li , Kai Zhang , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Xiangyu Zhao

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. Previous work applying KD in the field of large language models (LLMs) typically focused on the post-training phase, where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Hao Peng , Xin Lv , Yushi Bai , Zijun Yao , Jiajie Zhang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

On-policy knowledge distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts under token-level supervision from a teacher. Not all token positions matter equally, but existing views of token importance are incomplete. We ask a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuanda Xu , Hejian Sang , Zhengze Zhou , Ran He , Zhipeng Wang , Alborz Geramifard

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao

Recent deep metric learning (DML) methods typically leverage solely class labels to keep positive samples far away from negative ones. However, this type of method normally ignores the crucial knowledge hidden in the data (e.g., intra-class…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Zelong Zeng , Fan Yang , Hong Liu , Shin'ichi Satoh

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