arXiv AI

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.

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
Jun 18

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

arXiv:2606. 19236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training.

By Haipeng Luo, Qingfeng Sun, Songli Wu, Can Xu, Wenfeng Deng, Han Hu, Yansong Tang
arXiv AI
5d ago

Teach the Magnitude, Not the Direction: Verifier-Bounded Credit Assignment for Multi-Turn Multi-step LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 13179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) offers a verifier-bounded performance ceiling for training multi-turn tool-use agents, yet its trajectory-level credit assignment conflates heterogeneous per-turn outcomes into a single reward signal.

By Zechuan Wang, Siyuan Lu, Hongxuan Zhang, Linjian Mo, Chenyi Zhuang, Leilei Gan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Reward-Gated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation is a powerful way to transfer reasoning ability from a strong teacher to a smaller student: the student samples trajectories from its own policy, and the teacher provides dense token-level supervision on the states the student actually visits.

By Mohammad Sadegh Akhondzadeh, Vijay Lingam, Atula Tejaswi, Chanakya Ekbote, Sujay Sanghavi, Aleksandar Bojchevski
arXiv AI
Aug 7

DASH: Divergence-Adaptive Supervision Horizons for On-Policy Self-Distillation of Reasoning Models

arXiv:2608. 06243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level.

By ZhiYan Hou, Xinyu Tang, Hongyan An, Jianjin Zhang, Weizhen Wang, Yunyun Han, Gengsheng Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Haiyun Guo, Wenbin Hu, Jinqiao Wang, Yafeng Deng
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains.

By Xuanzhi Feng, Zhengyang Li, Zeyu Liu, Haoxi Li, Yuming Jiang, Bing Guo, Jingcai Guo, Jie Zhang, Song Guo