Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time.
arXiv:2608. 11829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a promising post-training technique for enhancing LLM reasoning.
By Xinmu Ge, Zizhuo Zhang, Yu Huang, Jianing Zhu, Lin Yuan, Wanli Gu, Weichang Wu, Weiran Huang, Xiaolu Zhang, Bo Han, Jun Zhou, Jiangchao Yao
arXiv:2608. 13721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reasoning supervised fine-tuning, candidate responses for the same instruction can differ substantially in how well they match the student's current distribution.
By Cuong Dang, Hoang Anh Just, Ruoxi Jia
arXiv:2606. 31048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates knowledge distillation from a large reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) to a compact student model (Qwen2.
By Gaurab Baral, Aaditya Khanal, Yangyang Tao, Junxiu Zhou
arXiv:2603. 26556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs.
By Juan Gabriel Kostelec, Qinghai Guo
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. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck.
arXiv:2512. 21002v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling the capabilities from a large reasoning model (LRM) to a smaller student model often involves training on substantial amounts of reasoning data.
By Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
arXiv:2607. 05184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation is a promising recipe for self-improvement in language models.
By Simran Kaur, Narutatsu Ri, Yinghui He, Liam Fowl, Sanjeev Arora
Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, but often at prohibitive training cost - a challenge that is especially acute for compact models ($\leq 4 \, \mathrm{B}$ parameters) trained under limited budgets. We introduce MADA-RL, a post-training framework that specializes compact models into generator and critic roles and trains them with a debate-aware learning signal, fine-tuning only a small subset of parameters via LoRA adapters.
arXiv:2608. 09351v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time scaling improves LLM accuracy but multiplies inference cost, making the accuracy gained per unit of compute the metric that matters in deployment.
By Nikita Kozodoi, Zainab Afolabi, Jack Butler
arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.
By Bishwas Mandal, Shmuel Berman, Akshay Vegesna, Samip Dahal
arXiv:2606. 12117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.
By Selen Erkan, Bastian Boll, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu