arXiv AI

Stage-1 Controls the Entropy Regime, Not the Outcome

arXiv:2606. 09059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Two-stage post-training -- a Stage-1 warm-start (supervised fine-tuning, SFT, or on-policy distillation, OPD) followed by Stage-2 reinforcement learning (RL) -- is increasingly used for vision-language models (VLMs).

arXiv AI
Aug 11

WDL-OPD: Weak-Driven On-Policy Distillation via Mixture-Constrained Co-Training

arXiv:2608. 09447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student with a teacher on trajectories sampled from the student itself, reducing the train-test state mismatch of offline distillation.

By Zehao Chen, Gongxun Li, Tianxiang Ai, Yifei Li, Zixuan Huang, Wang Zhou, Tao Huang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Xianglong Liu, Jianxin Li, Deqing Wang, Yikun Ban
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606. 11709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution.

By Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Extreme Region Policy Distillation

arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.

By Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Rui Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

WinDOM: Self-Family Distillation for Small-Model GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606. 25964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small ($\sim$2B) GUI-grounding agents are attractive for on-device deployment, accessibility tooling, and low-cost iteration, but at this scale they face two open recipe questions: how to obtain bounding-box training data without expensive human annotation, and how to combine supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning.

By Chengheng Li-Chen, Zhiqian Zhou, Hao Chen, Nicolas Chauvin
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
arXiv AI
Aug 3

SAF-OPD: Stable Advantage Fusion for On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 29209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) broadcasts a single response-level reward to every token, while on-policy distillation (OPD) scores each token against a stronger teacher for a dense advantage but caps performance at teacher quality and discourages exploration beyond it.

By Yifan Ding, Xincheng Wei, Yoshua Y. Li, Ziheng Li, Yuquan Lu, Siyu Zhang, Dongsheng Ma, Rongxiang Weng, Xunliang Cai, Yun Chen