arXiv Machine Learning

ALRA: Adaptive Local Relational Alignment for Logit-Based Pre-training Distillation of Autoregressive Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Local Relational Alignment (ALRA), a logit‑based knowledge distillation method for autoregressive language models that combines student‑generated token proposals with teacher guidance at each prediction position. ALRA dynamically selects the number of candidate tokens based on the teacher’s probability spread, uses Adaptive Local Divergence to match both mass and relative token distributions, and applies Student‑Weighted Pairwise Relational Alignment to focus on high‑probability token pairs. Experiments on The Pile show that 200M‑ and 500M‑parameter students trained with ALRA outperform the best baseline by roughly 1 percentage point and surpass pre‑training without distillation by over 2 percentage points on nine zero‑shot benchmarks.

arXiv AI
Jul 14

Stable On-Policy Distillation through Adaptive Target Reformulation

arXiv:2601. 07155v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring knowledge from large language models to smaller student models; however, conventional supervised KD often suffers from a distribution mismatch between training and inference.

By Ijun Jang, Jewon Yeom, Juan Yeo, Hyunggyu Lim, Taesup Kim
arXiv AI
Jul 23

When Does Knowledge Distillation Hurt? Reliability-Aware Distillation for Low-Resource Language Summarization

arXiv:2607. 19956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard approach for compressing sequence-to-sequence models, but its per-sample effects are rarely examined.

By Dipto Sumit, Ankan Kumar Roy Srizon, Sadia Khair Rodela, Atia Haque Asha, Mourchona Afrin, Niloy Farhan, Farig Sadeque
arXiv AI
2d ago

Multi-LLM Collaborative Alignment via Stackelberg Games

The paper introduces Stackelberg Alignment, a leader‑follower framework that lets a pool of language models collaborate and improve by learning from each other’s responses. An EXP3 bandit leader adaptively selects instructions based on difficulty and discriminability, while the models act as followers, evaluating peers and learning via DPO or GRPO with Elo‑style reputation weighting and opponent matching. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that this adaptive curriculum outperforms static baselines by up to 12‑25% and improves multi‑LLM evolution.

By Christina Hahn, Shangbin Feng, Dean Light, Swastik Roy, Hila Gonen, Yulia Tsvetkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

The paper presents a two-level framework for scalable trade‑up recommendation. Level 1 distills large‑language‑model reasoning into a compact, non‑generative student that classifies product pairs using only precomputed embeddings, achieving high AUC on a benchmark. Level 2 applies product‑type test‑time training to fine‑tune lightweight adapters, further improving performance while keeping inference fast and inexpensive.

By Siliang Liu, Mohammad Ghasemi, Sapan Patel, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Activation-Conditioned Self-Distillation

arXiv:2609.38342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher to provide dense supervision for reasoning, often through reference-solution conditioning....

By Zhexi Lu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Tejaswini Pedapati, Keerthiram Murugesan, Lei Yu
arXiv AI
1d ago

Distilling Directional Verification

arXiv:2610.00997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation aims to transfer the factual knowledge of large language models to smaller models for efficient deployment. Yet a teacher may...

By Jungseob Lee, Sugyeong Eo, Seongtae Hong, Seungyoon Lee, Chanjun Park, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Listening to the Wise Few: Query-Key Alignment Unlocks Latent Correct Answers in Large Language Models

arXiv:2410.02343v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) routinely fail to output the correct option in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) while encoding the answer int...

By Eduard Tulchinskii, Kristian Kuznetsov, Laida Kushnareva, Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrei Andriiainen, Irina Piontkovskaya, Evgeny Burnaev, Serguei Barannikov