arXiv:2603. 07079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy distillation is a promising approach for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student learns from dense token-level signals along its own trajectories.
By Woogyeol Jin, Taywon Min, Yongjin Yang, Dennis Wei, Yi Zhou, Swanand Ravindra Kadhe, Nathalie Baracaldo, Kimin Lee
arXiv:2604. 00626v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer.
By Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng
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:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
By Ayan Sengupta, Vaibhav Seth, Tanmoy Chakraborty
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: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
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:2608.29846v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sampled-token on-policy distillation (OPD) efficiently transfers capabilities from teacher to student using student-generated tokens, requiring teach...
By Run Yang, Runpeng Dai, Jie Sun, Jielei Zhang, Fan Zhou, Hongtu Zhu, Peiyi Li, Longwen Gao
arXiv:2509. 25837v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deliver remarkable performance but are costly to deploy, motivating knowledge distillation (KD) for efficient inference.
By Yeongmin Kim, Donghyeok Shin, Mina Kang, Byeonghu Na, Il-Chul Moon
arXiv:2609.26216v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A correct teacher solution becomes useful supervision when the receiving student can continue its reasoning. We measure this compatibility with prefix...
By Ruitong Li, Binjie Guo, Aisheng Mo, Guowei Su, Han Wang, Jie Li, Ru Zhang
arXiv:2608. 14728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an effective paradigm for transferring knowledge between language models, where a student is trained to align its next-token distribution with the teacher's along its own trajectories.
By Huipeng Huang, Hongxin Wei
arXiv:2609.17474v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) distillation aims to transfer the capabilities of a powerful teacher to a smaller student. Direct imitation, however, can...
By Haichen Hu, Yuheng Zhang, David Simchi-Levi