arXiv Machine Learning

Rethinking Reverse KL as Adaptive Entropy Distillation

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 AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Stable On-Policy Distillation through Adaptive Target Reformulation

arXiv:2601. 07155v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring knowledge from large language models to smaller student models; however, conventional supervised KD often suffers from a distribution mismatch between training and inference.

By Ijun Jang, Jewon Yeom, Juan Yeo, Hyunggyu Lim, Taesup Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 30

ARKD: Adaptive Reinforcement Learning-Guided Bidirectional KL Divergence Distillation for Text Generation

arXiv:2606. 29869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet methods relying on a single KL objective often fail to balance primary distribution fitting with long-tail probability modeling, limiting both generation quality and generalization.

By Zilong Liu, Xuewen Zhang, Jinrui Xing, Juyi Qiao, Huiyong Wang, Junming Jiao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

ARKD: Adaptive Reinforcement Learning-Guided Bidirectional KL Divergence Distillation for Text Generation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet methods relying on a single KL objective often fail to balance primary distribution fitting with long-tail probability modeling, limiting both generation quality and generalization. To address this, we analyze the complementary roles of forward and reverse KL divergence (FKL/RKL) in distribution alignment from theoretical and empirical perspectives.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs

arXiv:2604. 20244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful paradigm for compressing large language models (LLMs), whose effectiveness depends on intertwined choices of divergence direction, optimization strategy, and data regime.

By Wenhong Zhu, Ruobing Xie, Rui Wang, Pengfei Liu