arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.
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.
arXiv:2608.29623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown strong performance on complex problems through long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning...
Contrastive On-Policy Distillation (COPD) is a framework that improves on-policy distillation by using a frozen teacher to evaluate student states under two contrasting prompts—one encouraging low reasoning effort and one encouraging high effort. The difference in log‑probabilities between these prompts provides a token‑level advantage signal that guides the student toward more concise and efficient reasoning strategies. Experiments on nine multimodal benchmarks show that COPD reduces reasoning length while maintaining task performance, and the contrastive approach can also be applied to on‑policy self‑distillation, allowing a model to compress its own reasoning without an external teacher.
arXiv:2509. 14257v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model agents achieve strong performance on multi-step reasoning and tool-use tasks, but their impressive capabilities typically rely on extremely large backbones.
BoundaryEvo introduces a two‑stage data‑model co‑evolution framework for distilling long‑chain reasoning from large teacher models into small language models. First, Capability Priming distills a small set of teacher trajectories to give the student an initial reasoning baseline. Then, Capability‑Boundary Co‑Evolution iteratively selects questions the student has not mastered but the teacher can solve, updating the training data as the student’s capability grows. With only 1,000 examples, BoundaryEvo improves Qwen3.5‑4B accuracy from 62.9 % to 75.3 % on IMO‑AnswerBench and from 26.8 % to 46.0 % on AMO‑Bench, outperforming static and dynamic baselines across 11 benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.37044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explicit intermediate reasoning gives large language models (LLMs) a stronger problem-solving mode. We study learning from this think-mode advantage vi...
arXiv:2610.19439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While LLM-based agent systems have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in reasoning and solving complex real-world tasks, they also come with substanti...
arXiv:2605. 15532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets.
arXiv:2605.10194v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) uses a model as its own teacher under privileged context, providing token-level supervision on the model's own r...
OPDSearch+ introduces a two‑stage distillation framework for search‑augmented reasoning that eliminates the need for task‑specific teacher fine‑tuning. In the first stage, a frozen off‑the‑shelf instruct model guides a student through live search interactions using a per‑position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills. The second stage refines this student with reinforcement learning, achieving performance surpassing RL alone and outperforming all prior 3B‑parameter baselines on seven QA benchmarks, including 13.1% improvement on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.
The paper introduces Verifier-Gated Multi-Expert On-Policy Distillation (VG‑OPD), a method that assigns teacher supervision at the token level based on each expert’s counterfactual gain on a specific answer criterion. VG‑OPD localizes supervision where experts disagree most with the student and weights it by criterion importance, integrating this into a gated KL advantage for reinforcement learning. Applied to scientific reasoning, VG‑OPD achieves top performance on seven benchmarks for 4B and 8B models, outperforming prior multi‑teacher distillation approaches.