The paper introduces MoEvolve, a bidirectional distillation framework that leverages increased activation budgets in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models to create a stronger internal teacher. By first restoring a high‑k model and then transferring its enhanced capabilities back to the original low‑k configuration, MoEvolve improves performance across various MoE models and benchmarks, achieving up to 22.2 domain‑average points and outperforming same‑budget RLVR baselines by up to 6.5 points. The resulting low‑k models often surpass their activation‑expanded teachers.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck.
arXiv:2607. 05394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training.
arXiv:2609.08798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak-to-strong generalization asks whether stronger models can learn from weaker supervisors and surpass them. This question is particularly important...
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
arXiv:2610.20174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning on Mixed-domain preference data (Mix-RL) has become the mainstream approach for training general-purpose Generative Reward Model...
The paper introduces Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), a method that trains a single policy to act both as a privileged teacher and an unprivileged student. It derives a condition ensuring the teacher’s distillation update aligns positively with the student’s reward gradient, leading to a KL‑regularized teacher objective that matches the student’s current capabilities. Experiments show JOLT improves training efficiency and performance across various tasks, with additional gains when student rewards are incorporated.
RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation) is a new method that builds a synthetic teacher from a language model’s own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor in parameter or logit space, RISE transforms sparse outcome-based updates into dense token-level targets without external models or privileged conditioning. The approach recursively refines the student model, combining RLVR and on‑policy distillation, and demonstrates superior performance across mathematical reasoning, STEM, code generation, and multi‑turn agentic tasks.
arXiv:2607. 17247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) post-training is essential for improving reasoning, adaptation, and alignment.
arXiv:2610.14001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a self-teacher conditioned on privileged information to turn the sparse outcome signal of reinforcement learn...
arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD), showing that teacher supervision during OPD contains significant noise that grows with teacher size, yet the student policy remains largely unaffected by this noise. It finds that OPD’s gains stem mainly from suppressing low‑log‑probability tokens, a process that can be replicated without a teacher. Building on this insight, the authors propose On‑Policy Self‑Adaptation (OPSA), a supervision‑free method that uses entropy‑adaptive negative advantages to improve performance on several benchmarks, outperforming both the base model and OPD.
arXiv:2608. 08176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs by internalizing privileged context into model parameters through self-distillation.