arXiv Machine Learning

Extreme Region Policy Distillation

arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Trust Region On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606. 01249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression.

By Xingrun Xing, Haoqing Wang, Boyan Gao, Ziheng Li, Yehui Tang
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
Aug 3

Deconstructing Off-Policy Ratios: Entropy-Scaled Trust Regions for Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 22186v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse.

By Guanqun Zhao, Zijun Xie, Binbin Zheng, Enlei Gong, Jiafeng Lu, Yehan Yang, Aoqi Hu, Zeyu Chen
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 Computation and Language
Aug 25

Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization

arXiv:2608.23311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer...

By Xianlei Zhou, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Tianyu Qi, Shuyan Guan, Xianli Zhang, Jian Zhang, Xin Li, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 19

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.

By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang