arXiv Machine Learning

Train Where the Quantized Model Goes: On-Policy Distillation for Low-Bit Reasoning

arXiv AI
Aug 19

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.

By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Quantization Inflates Reasoning: Token Inflation as a Hidden Cost of Low-Bit Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 25519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantization is widely used to reduce the inference cost of large language models, but its effect on reasoning models is not fully captured by final-answer accuracy or per-token latency.

By Xinyu Lian, Walid Krichene, Beichen Huang, Masahiro Tanaka, Olatunji Ruwase, Li Zhang, Minjia Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Extremely Sparse Supervision Incentivizes Reasoning Ability

The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.

By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

ReQAT: Achieving Full-Precision Reasoning Accuracy with 4-bit Floating-Point Quantization-Aware Training

arXiv:2606. 15682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong problem-solving through long chain-of-thought, but their deployment is constrained by the high cost of full-precision inference and growing KV cache footprints.

By Janghwan Lee, Sihwa Lee, Jinseok Kim, Yongjik Kim, Jieun Lim, Jinwook Oh, Jungwook Choi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

DAMP: Decay-Aware Mixed-Precision Recurrent-State Quantization

The paper introduces DAMP, a decay‑aware mixed‑precision quantization scheme for recurrent‑state representations in GDN and KDA language models. By identifying high‑risk channels through quantization‑error energy and decay persistence, DAMP stores these channels at higher precision while compressing the rest to INT8, achieving a 9.9‑bit average precision. Experiments on Qwen3.6‑35B and Kimi‑Linear‑48B show a 69.1% reduction in recurrent‑state storage, up to 2.01× faster state‑update kernels, and up to 10.9% lower full‑model TPOT while preserving accuracy close to the FP32 baseline.

By Tao Zhang, Jianchao Tan, Pingwei Sun, Yanqi Yu, Zixu Jiang, Yuchen Xie, Xunliang Cai, Ziqian Zeng
arXiv AI
Aug 26

OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning

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