arXiv Machine Learning

The Distributional View of Knowledge Distillation

arXiv:2608. 15215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Token-level knowledge distillation (KD) matches two conditional distributions per position, yet the standard objectives compare them pointwise: a Kullback-Leibler gradient is blind to which wrong token receives probability mass.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

DemoPSD: Disagreement-Modulated Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 02502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a practical method for training large language models (LLMs) to reason, where a single model acts as both the teacher and the student with different levels of information access.

By Yunhe Li, Hao Shi, Wenhao Liu, Mengzhe Ruan, Hanxu Hou, Zhongxiang Dai, Shuang Qiu, Linqi Song
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

arXiv:2503. 08038v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels.

By Jiequan Cui, Beier Zhu, Qingshan Xu, Zhuotao Tian, Xiaojuan Qi, Bei Yu, Hanwang Zhang, Richang Hong
arXiv AI
2d ago

Self-Supervised Visual On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2608. 14144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual on-policy distillation relies heavily on an informative teacher-student asymmetry, through either a larger, stronger teacher or privileged supervision, such as reference answers or ground-truth regions of interest.

By Yijiang Li, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Bingyang Wang, Ke Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Di Fu, Philip Torr, Nuno Vasconcelos
arXiv AI
Jul 21

CADENCE: Closing the Reasoning Gap via Coverage-Adaptive On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 16955v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy knowledge distillation transfers reasoning from large teachers to compact students, but existing approaches suffer three compounding failure modes: (i) cold-start collapse, where a fresh student assigns near-zero mass to teacher-preferred tokens; (ii) state-agnostic divergence scheduling, where time-only forward/reverse-KL interpolation ignores the student's coverage state; and (iii) binary reward sparsity, where pass/fail signals discard information from partially correct traces.

By Satyam Kumar, Saurabh Jha