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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows robots to learn from offline datasets without risky exploration. Yet, offline RL's performance often hinges on a brittle trade-off between (1) return maximization, which can push policies outside…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Hokyun Im , Andrey Kolobov , Jianlong Fu , Youngwoon Lee

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yaxuan Li , Yuxin Zuo , Bingxiang He , Jinqian Zhang , Chaojun Xiao , Cheng Qian , Tianyu Yu , Huan-ang Gao , Wenkai Yang , Zhiyuan Liu , Ning Ding

In recent years, knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely used to derive efficient models. Through imitating a large teacher model, a lightweight student model can achieve comparable performance with more efficiency. However, most…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Qizhen Lan , Qing Tian

Partial observability is a notorious challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), due to the need to learn complex, history-dependent policies. Recent empirical successes have used privileged expert distillation--which leverages availability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Yuda Song , Dhruv Rohatgi , Aarti Singh , J. Andrew Bagnell

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

Diffusion models offer superior generation quality at the expense of extensive sampling steps. Distillation methods, with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) as a popular example, can mitigate this issue, but performance degradation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Xu Wang , Zexian Li , Litong Gong , Tiezheng Ge , Zhijie Deng

With the flourishing development of intelligent warehousing systems, the technology of Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has experienced rapid growth. Within intelligent warehousing environments, AGV is required to safely and rapidly plan an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Huilin Yin , Shengkai Su , Yinjia Lin , Pengju Zhen , Karin Festl , Daniel Watzenig

On-policy distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yifan Song , Minrui Xu , Yongxin Wang , Yiwei Wang , Xiaodan Liang , Jing Tang

Achieving high-fidelity generation in extremely few sampling steps has long been a central goal of generative modeling. Existing approaches largely rely on distillation-based frameworks to compress the original multi-step denoising process…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Rui Li , Bingyu Li , Yuanzhi Liang , Haibin Huang , Chi Zhang , XueLong Li

Generative models offer a promising paradigm for the final stage reranking in multi-stage recommender systems, with the ability to capture inter-item dependencies within reranked lists. However, their practical deployment still faces two…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Kai Cheng , Hao Wang , Wei Guo , Weiwen Liu , Yong Liu , Yawen Li , Enhong Chen

Distillation addresses the slow sampling problem in diffusion models by creating models with smaller size or fewer steps that approximate the behavior of high-step teachers. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Amirhossein Tighkhorshid , Zahra Dehghanian , Gholamali Aminian , Chengchun Shi , Hamid R. Rabiee

On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model. Despite its empirical success, the conditions under which…

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

Knowledge distillation offers a promising path to transfer reasoning capabilities from large teacher models to efficient student models; however, existing token-level on-policy distillation methods require token-level alignment between the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jing Xiong , Hui Shen , Shansan Gong , Yuxin Cheng , Jianghan Shen , Chaofan Tao , Haochen Tan , Haoli Bai , Lifeng Shang , Ngai Wong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fan Yang , Rui Meng , Trudi Di Qi , Ali Ezzati , Yuxin Wen

Distillation-based acceleration has become foundational for making autoregressive streaming video diffusion models practical, with distribution matching distillation (DMD) as the de facto choice. Existing methods, however, train the student…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Bin Wu , Mengqi Huang , Shaojin Wu , Weinan Jia , Yuxin Wang , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

With growing interest in deploying text-to-video (T2V) models in resource-constrained environments, reducing their high computational cost has become crucial, leading to extensive research on pruning and knowledge distillation methods while…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jisoo Kim , Wooseok Seo , Junwan Kim , Seungho Park , Sooyeon Park , Youngjae Yu

We study {on-policy self-distillation} (OPSD), where a language model improves its reasoning ability by distilling privileged teacher distributions along its own on-policy trajectories. Despite the performance gains of OPSD, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiao Yang , Xiaoyun Wang , Weitong Zhang

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zehao Liu , Yuanpu Cao , Jinghui Chen , Vasant G. Honavar

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