arXiv:2608. 13721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reasoning supervised fine-tuning, candidate responses for the same instruction can differ substantially in how well they match the student's current distribution.
arXiv:2608. 11829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning.
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...
arXiv:2607.22629v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time. These intermediate t...
The paper investigates data efficiency and selection in On‑Policy Distillation (OPD) for large language models. It shows that 1‑shot OPD—training on a single example—consistently improves performance, especially when the example is hard, and that longer chain‑of‑thought (CoT) paths drive the gains rather than token entropy. Based on these findings, the authors propose a simple hard‑example selection strategy that, using only eight carefully chosen hard examples, matches the performance of a 17,000‑example baseline across models from 1.5B to 7B parameters.
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:2608. 12307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods.
Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time.
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:2608. 08176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs by internalizing privileged context into model parameters through self-distillation.
On-policy Distillation (OPD) supervises a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy by minimizing the divergence between the output distributions of the teacher and student at each token position, thereby providing dense token-level supervision. Although existing OPD methods have demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning ability of student models, their objectives fundamentally rely on token-level distribution matching.
arXiv:2606. 31048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates knowledge distillation from a large reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) to a compact student model (Qwen2.
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.