arXiv Machine Learning

$\beta$-OPSD: Deriving with Policy Optimization, Training with Self-Distillation

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

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 AI
Aug 11

Matching Supervision to the Student's Learning Capacity: A Unified Framework for On-Policy Self-Distillation

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.

By Yongkang Yang, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Zhang, Yi Liu, Xiankun Lin, Wence Ji, Fanjunduo Wei, Jiarui Yu, Qiang Lin, Xiaoyun Liang, Hande Dong
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SR-OPSD: Self-Referenced On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.

By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 05394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training.

By Shiyuan Feng, Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi, Hanlin Wu, Zhilong Zhang, Zheng Jiang, Bingxiang He, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

REGEN: Replay-recycling for Expert-to-Generalist distillation with Offline Reinforcement Learning

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

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.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski