arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
By Yubo Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Zezhong Tan, Ziqiang Dong
arXiv:2609.23697v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multi-teacher on-policy distillation allows a student to learn from complementary specialists on its own trajectories. Domain-routed approaches, howe...
By Jie Sun, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Zeyuan Liu, Gengsheng Li, Houcheng Jiang, Yilin Cheng, Bichuan Feng, Yuchen Cai, Junfeng Fang, Xiang Wang
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.
By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv:2609.36642v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language-model agents are usually trained by reinforcement learning from one reward per episode, and privileged self-distillation enriches it by lettin...
By Muyang Li, Jie Yang, Zhengyu Fang, Junchao Zhu, Zhengkun Xiao, Ruining Deng, Zhe Jiang, Shigang Chen
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.
By Yi Ding, Ruqi Zhang
arXiv:2606. 29476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-distilled agentic reinforcement learning augments trajectory-level reward with a token-level distillation loss, using as its teacher the same policy conditioned on privileged context.
By Zibin Meng, Kani Chen
arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.
By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng
arXiv:2608. 03223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit.
By Ranxu Zhang, Guinan Chen, Chenshaodong, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhou Xu, Sunzhe, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang
The paper introduces Multi-Teacher Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (MT‑SDPO), an on‑policy distillation method that combines multiple frozen teachers into a single student model. MT‑SDPO uses self‑anchors, answer‑verified eligibility, and privileged distillation to select reliable teachers per sample rather than per domain. Experiments on five students from three model families show that MT‑SDPO improves the weakest domain of Qwen3‑8B by 14.79 points and reduces its domain gap by 74.7%, achieving a more balanced performance than matching a single teacher to each domain.
By Xixiang He, Xingming Li, Baiqi Wu, Qiyao Sun, Xuanyu Ji, Ao Cheng, Qingyong Hu
arXiv:2608. 05219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privileged on-policy distillation provides dense supervision for multi-turn agents by allowing a synchronized teacher to re-score the student's response at every turn with access to training-only references, such as successful trajectories.
By Junzhuo Liu, Weiwei Li, Jun Ling, Peng Wang
The paper introduces Multi-Teacher Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (MT‑SDPO), an on‑policy distillation method that combines multiple frozen teachers into a single student model. MT‑SDPO uses self‑anchors, answer‑verified eligibility, and privileged distillation to identify the most reliable teacher for each sample rather than relying on domain labels. Experiments on five students from three model families show that MT‑SDPO improves the weakest domain of Qwen3‑8B by 14.79 points and reduces its domain gap by 74.7%, achieving a better balance than matching a single teacher per domain.
The paper introduces Preference‑Based Self‑Distillation (PBSD), a new on‑policy self‑distillation method that replaces traditional KL matching with a reward‑regularized objective. PBSD derives a reward‑reweighted teacher distribution, optimizing preference gaps between teacher and student samples while keeping on‑policy sampling. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool‑use tasks show PBSD achieves stronger average performance, improved training stability, and maintains token efficiency compared to prior self‑distillation baselines.
By Xin Yu, Liuchen Liao, Yiwen Zhang, Yingchen Yu, Lingzhou Xue, Qinzhen Guo