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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

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 distillation has recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard sequence-level imitation, training a student by scoring its own rollouts with a teacher model. However, we observe ``Off-policy Teacher Decay'' problem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhou Ziheng , Jiaqi Li , Huacong Tang , Ying Nian Wu , Demetri Terzopoulos

GRPO-style RLVR trains reasoning models from multiple on-policy attempts per prompt, but typically uses these attempts only through terminal rewards. We show that a mixed group contains a richer process signal: a correct completion is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhiquan Tan , Yinrong Hong

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

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers reasoning behavior by training a student on teacher feedback along student-generated trajectories, but standard full-rollout training ties every update to a costly completion and can over-allocate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kun Liang , Chenming Tang , Clive Bai , Weijie Liu , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

Reinforcement learning for multi-turn agents suffers from a credit-assignment mismatch: rewards are sparse and trajectory-level, while success often hinges on a few local decisions. Existing online policy distillation (OPD) provides denser…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yanfei Zhang , Xu Lin , Chenglin Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for post-training LLM agents, yet its trajectory-level reward signal provides only coarse supervision for long-horizon interaction. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) complements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zhengxi Lu , Zhiyuan Yao , Zhuowen Han , Zi-Han Wang , Jinyang Wu , Qi Gu , Xunliang Cai , Weiming Lu , Jun Xiao , Yueting Zhuang , Yongliang Shen

In learning-to-rank problems, a privileged feature is one that is available during model training, but not available at test time. Such features naturally arise in merchandised recommendation systems; for instance, "user clicked this item"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Shuo Yang , Sujay Sanghavi , Holakou Rahmanian , Jan Bakus , S. V. N. Vishwanathan

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

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Qiyong Zhong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Xin Lin , Jie Sun , Houcheng Jiang , Xiang Wang , Junfeng Fang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jiaze Li , Hao Yin , Haoran Xu , Boshen Xu , Wenhui Tan , Zewen He , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Jian Luan

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

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

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-31 Di Cao , Dongjie Fu , Hai Yu , Siqi Zheng , Xu Tan , Tao Jin

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

Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Walid Bousselham , Hilde Kuehne , Cordelia Schmid

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

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