arXiv Machine Learning

Stabilizing On-Policy Distillation for MLLM Reasoning with Global Normalization

arXiv:2606. 09091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an important post-training paradigm.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2608. 16333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories.

By Changhui Sun, Lanbo Liu, Hang Lei, Tong Ling, Jiahang Xie, Zhiyong Zheng, Yujia Wang, Hao Liu, Feng Xiao, Lu Liu, Yanlong Du, Zifeng Cheng, Ziwei Jiang, Qing Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Uni-OPD: Unifying On-Policy Distillation with a Dual-Perspective Recipe

arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.

By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Extremely Sparse Supervision Incentivizes Reasoning Ability

The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.

By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Contrastive Reinforced Policy Optimization via Privileged Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 28026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD).

By Xingjian Wu, Junlin Liu, Xingchen Liu, Xuhang Zhu, Jianing Wang, Linsen Guo, Xiaoyu Li, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Teaching the Way, Not the Answer: Privileged Tutoring Distillation for Multimodal Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606. 07000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent post-training methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced the reasoning ability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs).

By Shizhe Xiang, Ke An, Wenlong Yu, Yue Liu, Jian Luan, Pei Fu, Qilong Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.

By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang