Related papers: Self-Policy Distillation via Capability-Selective …
Can a large language model (LLM) improve at code generation using only its own raw outputs, without a verifier, a teacher model, or reinforcement learning? We answer in the affirmative with simple self-distillation (SSD): sample solutions…
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…
Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…
On-policy distillation is an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning, offering dense token-level training signals. However, its reliance on a stronger external teacher has driven recent work on on-policy self-distillation, where the…
Can post-trained large language models (LLMs) further improve themselves using only unlabeled prompts, without external teachers or feedback from tools? We study this setting starting only from unlabeled seed questions with no ground-truth…
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…
The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In…
Large language models are expensive to deploy. We introduce Sparse Knowledge Distillation (SparseKD), a post-training method that compresses transformer models by combining structured SVD pruning with self-referential knowledge…
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…
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…
Most deep metric learning (DML) methods employ a strategy that forces all positive samples to be close in the embedding space while keeping them away from negative ones. However, such a strategy ignores the internal relationships of…
Since deep learning became a key player in natural language processing (NLP), many deep learning models have been showing remarkable performances in a variety of NLP tasks, and in some cases, they are even outperforming humans. Such high…
In spite of strong performance achieved by LLMs, the costs of their deployment are unaffordable. For the compression of LLMs, gradient-based pruning methods present promising effectiveness. However, in these methods, the gradient…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to proprietary and domain-specific corpora that contain sensitive information, creating a tension between formal privacy guarantees and efficient deployment through model compression.…
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…
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…
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…
Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) provides dense token-level credit assignment for reinforcement learning with large language models by leveraging the model's own feedback-conditioned predictions as a self-teacher. Unlike GRPO,…
Capability distillation applies knowledge distillation to selected model capabilities, aiming to compress a large language model (LLM) into a smaller one while preserving the abilities needed for a downstream task. However, most existing…
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…