LoopOPD introduces a cross-loop on-policy distillation framework that uses a frozen terminal loop policy as a compute-privileged teacher for intermediate loop students, providing dense supervision without external teachers. Dynamic LoopOPD (D-LoopOPD) further refreshes the terminal loop teacher as model parameters update, enabling recurrent self‑improvement. Experiments on Ouro‑Thinking models show that LoopOPD enhances mathematical reasoning and that D‑LoopOPD yields additional gains, with the models also improving on general reasoning and code generation benchmarks.
By Yi Wang, Rui Qian, Yu Li, Haoyang Yao, Wenjie Wang
arXiv:2609.36636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Looped language models (LoopLMs) increase computational depth through parameter sharing, offering a path to scale inference computation without adding...
By Xinlin Zhuang, Siyuan Wang, Imran Razzak, Weiyang Liu
arXiv:2603.19714v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Looped language models (LoopLMs) perform iterative latent computation to refine internal representations, offering an alternative to explicit chain...
By Guo Tang, Shixin Jiang, Heng Chang, Zihan Zhang, Nuo Chen, Yuhan Li, Huiming Fan, Jia Li, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
arXiv:2610.18162v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation improves a model using guidance from the model itself, but it still requires a teacher that provides more useful predicti...
By Wei Fan, Qingyue Yang, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
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
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
Large-scale online reinforcement learning (RL) is the predominant means of eliciting advanced abilities including long-term reasoning and agentic tool use in large language models (LLMs). However, continuing to scale it across vast task domains of interest remains challenging in both computational infrastructure and cost, especially when considering RL as merely a one-off learning stage.
The paper presents practical training recipes for looped language models, showing that a compute‑efficient pipeline can reduce the training budget from 7.7 T tokens to 310 B tokens while maintaining strong reasoning performance. In controlled experiments, a 1.4 B LoopLM outperforms a parameter‑matched dense model on 12 benchmarks, achieving significant gains on GSM8K, MATH, and DROP, and approaches a 3.9 B dense model at matched inference compute. The authors also provide a minimal recipe to convert pretrained dense models into looped ones, demonstrating improvements on Qwen3‑1.7B‑Base across multiple data regimes.
By Andrei Marchenko, Viacheslav Bezrukov, Oleg Kashurin, Inessa Fedorova, Dmitry Bocharov, Yuliana Shakhvalieva, Maria Tikhonova, Valerii Ternovskii
arXiv:2609.33149v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A common principle of effective learning is to practice material that is neither already mastered nor too difficult to permit progress. We ask how...
By Hongbo Chen, Guohua Lu, Ting Dang, Hong Jia
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
The paper introduces Echo-GRPO, a method that rewrites privileged reasoning traces into a model’s own idiolect to align off‑policy supervision with the student policy’s vocabulary. By preserving semantics through Dual‑Reference Decoding, Echo‑GRPO mitigates gradient clipping on critical reasoning tokens and improves reasoning distillation. The approach is instantiated as VideoEcho‑R1 for video reasoning, yielding consistent gains across multiple multimodal LLM backbones and benchmarks, and it can be applied as a plug‑in to both RL and supervised fine‑tuning frameworks.
By Ji Soo Lee, Jinyoung Park, Seohyun Lee, Jongha Kim, Joonmyung Choi, Jinsung Yoon, Hyunwoo J. Kim
arXiv:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.
By Xiuwei Chen, Wentao Hu, Hanhui Li, Yongxin Wang Jun Zhou, Zisheng Chen, Meng Cao, Yihan Zeng, Kui Zhang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang