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On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Junfeng Fang , Zhepei Hong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Gengsheng Li , Houcheng Jiang , Dan Zhang , Haiyun Guo , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

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

Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhenglin Wan , Jingxuan Wu , Xingrui Yu , Chubin Zhang , Mingcong Lei , Bo An , Ivor W. Tsang , Yang You

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an effective post-training paradigm for large language models but requires a live teacher server throughout training, resulting in substantial infrastructure overhead. We investigate whether OPD can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yecheng Wu , Song Han , Hai Cai

Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Emiliano Penaloza , Dheeraj Vattikonda , Nicolas Gontier , Alexandre Lacoste , Laurent Charlin , Massimo Caccia

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

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

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xinqiang Yu , Chuanguang Yang , Chengqing Yu , Libo Huang , Zhulin An , Yongjun Xu

Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khouloud Saadi , Di Wang

Knowledge distillation conducts an effective model compression method while holding some limitations:(1) the feature based distillation methods only focus on distilling the feature map but are lack of transferring the relation of data…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Muzhou Yu , Sia Huat Tan , Kailu Wu , Runpei Dong , Linfeng Zhang , Kaisheng Ma

Self-distillation (SD) is the process of first training a \enquote{teacher} model and then using its predictions to train a \enquote{student} model with the \textit{same} architecture. Specifically, the student's objective function is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Rudrajit Das , Sujay Sanghavi

Self-distillation enables language models to learn on-policy from their own trajectories by using the same model as both student and teacher, with the teacher being conditioned on privileged information unavailable to the student. Such…

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

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

Advances in self-distillation have shown that when knowledge is distilled from a teacher to a student using the same deep learning (DL) architecture, the student performance can surpass the teacher particularly when the network is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Muhammad Haseeb Aslam , Clara Martinez , Marco Pedersoli , Alessandro Koerich , Ali Etemad , Eric Granger

In modern large language models (LLMs), LLM alignment is of crucial importance and is typically achieved through methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). However, in most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Songming Zhang , Xue Zhang , Tong Zhang , Bojie Hu , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu

Growing efforts to improve knowledge distillation (KD) in large language models (LLMs) replace dense teacher supervision with selective distillation, which uses a subset of token positions, vocabulary classes, or training samples for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Almog Tavor , Itay Ebenspanger , Neil Cnaan , Mor Geva

Knowledge distillation has emerged as an effective strategy for compressing large language models' (LLMs) knowledge into smaller, more efficient student models. However, standard one-shot distillation methods often produce suboptimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Kushal Jain , Piyushi Goyal , Kumar Shridhar