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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

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haodi Lei , Yafy Li , Haoran Zhang , Shunkai Zhang , Qianjia Cheng , Xiaoye Qu , Ganqu Cui , Bowen Zhou , Ning Ding , Yun Luo , Yu Cheng

Offline reinforcement learning endeavors to leverage offline datasets to craft effective agent policy without online interaction, which imposes proper conservative constraints with the support of behavior policies to tackle the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Yunpeng Qing , Shunyu liu , Jingyuan Cong , Kaixuan Chen , Yihe Zhou , Mingli Song

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

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang

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) is widely used for LLM post-training. When pushed with a reward-extrapolation coefficient lambda > 1, the student can lift past the teacher in domain, but past a threshold lambda* the same step violates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xin Li , Hao Jiang , Annan Wang , Yichi Zhang , Chau Yuen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xin Yu , Liuchen Liao , Yiwen Zhang , Yingchen Yu , Lingzhou Xue , Qinzhen Guo

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains student models under their own induced distribution while leveraging supervision from stronger teachers. We identify a failure mode of OPD: as training progresses, on-policy rollouts can undergo abrupt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Feng Luo , Yu-Neng Chuang , Guanchu Wang , Zicheng Xu , Xiaotian Han , Tianyi Zhang , Vladimir Braverman

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yuanyi Wang , Su Lu , Yanggan Gu , Pengkai Wang , Yifan Yang , Zhaoyi Yan , Congkai Xie , Jianmin Wu , Hongxia Yang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siyan Zhao , Zhihui Xie , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Guan Pang , Feiyu Chen , Aditya Grover

Discrete diffusion models have demonstrated great promise in modeling various sequence data, ranging from human language to biological sequences. Inspired by the success of RL in language models, there is growing interest in further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jiaqi Han , Austin Wang , Minkai Xu , Wenda Chu , Meihua Dang , Haotian Ye , Huayu Chen , Yisong Yue , Stefano Ermon

Diffusion models have been widely studied for removing unsafe content learned during pre-training. Existing methods require expensive supervised data, either unsafe-text paired with safe-image groundtruth or negative/positive image pairs,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Komal Kumar , Ankan Deria , Abhishek Basu , Fahad Shamshad , Hisham Cholakkal , Karthik Nandakumar

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

LLM-based generation of SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) is often reported as nearing saturation, with the strongest specialized model reaching ${\sim}76\%$ accuracy on NL2SVA-Human. We show that this aggregate hides a temporal gap: models…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Qingyun Zou , Yingze Li , Tianen Liu , Bingsheng He , Weng-Fai Wong

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

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

We propose Algorithm Distillation (AD), a method for distilling reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms into neural networks by modeling their training histories with a causal sequence model. Algorithm Distillation treats learning to…