arXiv:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
By Ayan Sengupta, Vaibhav Seth, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv:2609.01532v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) is used to train smaller language models (LMs) via supervision from stronger teachers, but whether its benefits...
By Jacqueline He, Howard Yen, Shuyue Stella Li, Margaret Li, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Benyu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih
arXiv:2605. 03677v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model.
By Wenjin Hou, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Zheng Ruan, Yue Zhang, Zhenglin Zhou, Mingqi Gao, Yifei Chen, Kaiqi Wang, Hongming Yang, Chengquan Zhang, Zhuotao Tian, Han Hu, Yi Yang, Fei Wu, Hehe Fan
arXiv:2608. 06296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs).
By Yijiang Li, Bingyang Wang, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Nuno Vasconcelos
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:2607. 17247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) post-training is essential for improving reasoning, adaptation, and alignment.
By Chen Wang, Zhaochun Li, Jionghao Bai, Yining Zhang, Hexuan Deng, Ge Lan, Yue Wang
On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods still rely heavily on external supervision, including ground-truth signals, environmental feedback, or guidance from larger models, and therefore fall short of genuine "self"-distillation.
arXiv:2608. 12764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment.
By Haoze Wu, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianyi Zhuang, Xiaoguang Li
arXiv:2609.37041v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Self-Distillation Fine-Tuning (SDFT) enables a language model to act as its own teacher: by conditioning on a demonstration, the model produces an im...
By Su Ee Tan, Xiaotong Ji, Rasul Tutunov, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Matthieu Zimmer
arXiv:2607. 17558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers a promising approach for training large language models without relying on a separate teacher model.
By Fan Yang, Rui Meng, Yuxin Wen
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.
By Qinglin Ye, Zhiyuan Gu, Jingjie Xia, Yiheng Zhang, Kaiyan Zhao, Shunchao Zheng, Yuhang Mu, Wenchao Du, Yiming Wang
arXiv:2609.37132v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) improves large language models by letting a self-teacher with privileged information provide dense token-level super...
By Zheng Zhang, Xinyue Tan, Lufei Li, Xinyi Zhang, Yexin Li, Kan Ren