arXiv AI

Answer-then-Edit: Reasoning Skeleton Editing for Anti-Distillation with Preserved Utility

arXiv:2607. 20440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proprietary large language models (LLMs) entail substantial intellectual and financial investment, making them valuable intellectual property (IP).

arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond Scaling Law: A Data-Efficient Distillation Framework for Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.

By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

Negative Self-Distillation (NSD) is a new framework for improving large language models by encouraging them to diverge from their own flawed reasoning rather than imitate privileged solutions. Unlike On-Policy Self-Distillation, which can suppress uncertainty and exploratory behavior, NSD generates a question‑specific negative condition (e.g., a careless reasoner) and uses a dynamic gating mechanism to target only reasoning‑critical tokens for penalization. This approach preserves foundational language capabilities while consistently outperforming OPSD and other label‑free self‑bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.

By Rongcan Pei, Zhepei Wei, Shuyao Xu, Xinyu Zhu, Wei-Lin Chen, Yu Meng
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Offline Guidance, Online Reasoning: Reusing LLM Feedback for Small Language Models

arXiv:2609.39346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities but are often costly to access through commercial APIs, while small language models (S...

By Bohan Zhang (Southeast University), Linan Yue (Southeast University), Weibo Gao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Pengyu Chen (Southeast University), Hong Guo (Southeast University), Yanqi Hao (ZTE Corporation)
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 10

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

Negative Self-Distillation (NSD) is a new framework for improving large language models by encouraging them to diverge from their own flawed reasoning rather than imitate privileged solutions. Unlike On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), which can suppress uncertainty and exploratory behavior, NSD generates a question‑specific negative condition (e.g., a careless reasoner) and pushes the student’s distribution away from it. A dynamic gating mechanism isolates reasoning‑critical tokens so that only behavioral flaws are penalized, preserving linguistic capabilities, and empirical results show NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label‑free self‑bootstrapping RL baselines.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoning

ASDA (Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation) is a framework that improves large language models on financial reasoning tasks without fine‑tuning. It works by having a teacher model analyze a student’s failures, cluster errors, and generate structured skill artifacts—reasoning procedures, code templates, and worked examples—that are injected during inference. On the FAMMA benchmark, ASDA boosts arithmetic reasoning by up to 17.33% and non‑arithmetic reasoning by 5.95%, outperforming existing training‑free methods.

By Tik Yu Yim, Wenting Tan, Sum Yee Chan, Tak-Wah Lam, Siu Ming Yiu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Reason in the Words You Speak: Idiolectal Paraphrasing Off-Policy Traces for Reasoning Distillation in VideoLLMs

The paper introduces Echo-GRPO, a method that rewrites privileged reasoning traces into a model’s own idiolect to align off‑policy supervision with the student policy’s vocabulary. By preserving semantics through Dual‑Reference Decoding, Echo‑GRPO mitigates gradient clipping on critical reasoning tokens and improves reasoning distillation. The approach is instantiated as VideoEcho‑R1 for video reasoning, yielding consistent gains across multiple multimodal LLM backbones and benchmarks, and it can be applied as a plug‑in to both RL and supervised fine‑tuning frameworks.

By Ji Soo Lee, Jinyoung Park, Seohyun Lee, Jongha Kim, Joonmyung Choi, Jinsung Yoon, Hyunwoo J. Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Data-Centric Post-Training for Financial Reasoning: Mining, Distillation, and Verifiable Learning

The paper introduces a data‑centric pipeline for post‑training language models on financial reasoning tasks. It mines open‑source reasoning traces, distills financial instruction data, and generates knowledge‑graph‑guided question‑answer pairs, then filters examples with lightweight classifiers and applies reinforcement learning with rule‑based verifiers. Experiments on FINESSE‑Bench show that retention‑aware adaptation—self‑distilled fine‑tuning and model merging—outperforms ordinary supervised fine‑tuning, improving accuracy by up to 3.0 points and avoiding regressions.

By Zhirayr Hayrapetyan, Andrei Kalmykov, Denis Kokosinskii, Dmitry Stanishevskii, Dmitry Zmitrovich