arXiv:2606. 00306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is widely favored over forward KL (FKL) in large language models (LLM) distillation, yet this preference is largely based on comparisons that omit the temperature $\tau$, overlooking its central role in softening teacher distributions and improving knowledge transfer.
arXiv:2608.22898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) alleviate the inherent latency bottleneck of autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs), but their degraded gene...
arXiv:2606. 00755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards improves the reasoning ability of large language models, but often suffers from entropy collapse, in which increasingly concentrated policies reduce rollout diversity and useful learning signals.
arXiv:2608. 14685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely used to transfer the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, but existing objectives often struggle to balance faithful imitation and robust generation.
arXiv:2607. 08776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the success of knowledge distillation (KD) in Large Language Models (LLMs), the underlying mechanism behind its efficacy remains unclear.
The paper investigates how the choice of divergence in knowledge distillation affects the entropy of the student model. It shows that forward KL increases student entropy beyond the teacher’s, while reverse KL decreases it, and that interpolating between the two yields a smooth entropy change early in training but a sharp shift at convergence. The study also finds that on‑policy distillation’s lower entropy stems from token‑level reverse KL rather than sampling, positioning divergence as an implicit entropy regularizer, especially evident in self‑distillation scenarios.
arXiv:2606. 09456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for transferring knowledge from domain experts to student models.
arXiv:2603. 07079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories.
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...
arXiv:2603. 01875v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is an essential technique to compress large language models (LLMs) into smaller ones.
The paper introduces Reward‑Tilted On‑Policy Distillation (RT‑OPD), a method that enhances acoustic grounding in audio‑language models by using a frozen teacher to generate a reward based on the contrast between token predictions with and without audio. This reward reshapes the teacher distribution for reverse‑KL distillation, encouraging students to rely more on acoustic evidence. Experiments on two compact students across three benchmarks show that RT‑OPD consistently outperforms vanilla OPD, and a 3B model trained with RT‑OPD achieves 72.72% accuracy on the MMAU benchmark, surpassing other 3B models and rivaling larger 7B and 8B models.
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard approach for compressing sequence-to-sequence models, but its per-sample effects are rarely examined. On the BanSum Bangla summarization benchmark, we find that standard KD improves ROUGE-L by only +0.
The paper investigates how teacher signals influence parameter updates in Multi‑Teacher On‑Policy Distillation (MOPD) by analyzing Qwen3‑1.7B and SmolLM3‑3B. It shows that loss averaging, Adam’s first‑moment bias, BF16 rounding, and the choice of averaging rule all shape the gradients and ultimately affect task performance. The study quantifies these effects, revealing, for example, that token‑averaging favors longer responses and that BF16 rounding masks most weight changes.