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The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently shifting from the inefficient multi-step ones to the efficient few-step counterparts (e.g, Z-Image-Turbo and FLUX.2-klein). However, these models present significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dengyang Jiang , Xin Jin , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Mingzhe Zheng , Ruoyi Du , Xiangpeng Yang , Qilong Wu , Zhen Li , Peng Gao , Harry Yang , Steven Hoi

Post-training of flow matching models-aligning the output distribution with a high-quality target-is mathematically equivalent to imitation learning. While Supervised Fine-Tuning mimics expert demonstrations effectively, it cannot correct…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yeyao Ma , Chen Li , Xiaosong Zhang , Han Hu , Weidi Xie

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Zhang , Xiangyu Peng , Qinglin Chen , Qinyuan Ye , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

Few-step diffusion or flow-based generative models typically distill a velocity-predicting teacher into a student that predicts a shortcut towards denoised data. This format mismatch has led to complex distillation procedures that often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Hansheng Chen , Kai Zhang , Hao Tan , Leonidas Guibas , Gordon Wetzstein , Sai Bi

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

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

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

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Miao Rang , Zhenni Bi , Hang Zhou , Kai Han , Xuechun Wang , An Xiao , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang , Hanting 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

Expressive policies based on flow-matching have been successfully applied in reinforcement learning (RL) more recently due to their ability to model complex action distributions from offline data. These algorithms build on standard policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Qianhao Yuan , Jie Lou , Xing Yu , Hongyu Lin , Le Sun , Xianpei Han , Yaojie Lu

Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

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

Recent progress in accelerating text-to-image diffusion models enables high-fidelity synthesis within a single denoising step. However, customizing the fast one-step models remains challenging, as existing methods consistently fail to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Yixiong Yang , Tao Wu , Senmao Li , Shiqi Yang , Yaxing Wang , Joost van de Weijer , Kai Wang

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

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yang Li , Erik Nijkamp , Semih Yavuz , Shafiq Joty

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

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful paradigm to align language models with human preferences using pairwise comparisons. However, its binary win-or-loss supervision often proves insufficient for training small models with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Minchan Kwon , Junwon Ko , Kangil Kim , Junmo Kim

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Haoran Xu , Li Jiang , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan