On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective approach for large language model post-training, yet existing objectives face a trade-off between objective fidelity and optimization stability...
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang
arXiv:2605.06387v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy dist...
By Nan Jia, Haojin Yang, Xing Ma, Jiesong Lian, Shuailiang Zhang, Weipeng Zhang, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai, Zequn Sun
Multi-constraint instruction following requires a model to respond to a query under many simultaneously active constraints. Even strong instruction-tuned models still routinely violate some of them. E...
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:2604. 00626v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer.
By Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng
arXiv:2609.21432v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training plays a pivotal role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities and task-specific expertise of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent...
By Kaichen Zhang, Yuzhong Hong, Junwei Bao, Hongfei Jiang, Yang Song, Dingqian Hong, Hui Xiong
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
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv:2607. 28582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising approach to improve reasoning language models, but it remains brittle in practice: making it work reliably often requires substantial engineering effort.
By Jiawei Xu, Minghui Liu, Juzheng Zhang, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang
arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.
By Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Rui Yan
arXiv:2608. 06243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level.
By ZhiYan Hou, Xinyu Tang, Hongyan An, Jianjin Zhang, Weizhen Wang, Yunyun Han, Gengsheng Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Haiyun Guo, Wenbin Hu, Jinqiao Wang, Yafeng Deng