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Knowledge distillation from large language models (LLMs) assumes that the teacher's output distribution is a high-quality training signal. On reasoning tasks, this assumption is frequently violated. A model's intermediate representations…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Prompt learning has become one of the most efficient paradigms for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. Current state-of-the-art methods, like CoOp and ProDA, tend to adopt soft prompts to learn an…

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by providing dense token-level supervision for on-policy rollouts. However, existing OPSD methods often yield limited gains on in-domain…

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…

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…

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…

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality…

In this paper, a novel confidence conditioned knowledge distillation (CCKD) scheme for transferring the knowledge from a teacher model to a student model is proposed. Existing state-of-the-art methods employ fixed loss functions for this…

Supervised fine-tuning with expert demonstrations often produces models that imitate outputs without internalizing the reasoning processes needed for robust generalization. While critique-based approaches show promise, training models to…

While knowledge distillation has seen widespread use in pre-training and instruction tuning, its application to aligning language models with human preferences remains underexplored, particularly in the more realistic cross-tokenizer…

Whereas the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has exhibited impressive general performance, it still has a large gap with fully-supervised models on specific tasks such as multi-span question answering. Previous…

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…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Large language models (LLMs) encode parametric knowledge about world facts and have shown remarkable performance in knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge may cause them to overlook contextual cues,…

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems facilitate users in executing various activities via multi-turn dialogues, but Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to comprehend these intricate contexts. In this study, we propose a novel…

On-policy self-distillation trains a reasoning model on its own rollouts while a teacher, often the same model conditioned on privileged context, provides dense token-level supervision. Existing objectives typically weight the teacher's…

We propose Reinforcement Learning from Contrastive Distillation (RLCD), a method for aligning language models to follow principles expressed in natural language (e.g., to be more harmless) without using human feedback. RLCD creates…

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…

Advanced reasoning typically requires Chain-of-Thought prompting, which is accurate but incurs prohibitive latency and substantial test-time inference costs. The standard alternative, fine-tuning smaller models, often sacrifices…